I’ve always seen that lyric as being written in-character as the fat guy in the video, not necessarily representative of Knopfler himself. However, I’ve never been too comfortable with it either…

As for the “young women liking it” thing, add racism and homophobia to it and you have the disco backlash also. I’ve always been a synthpop fan even going back to elementary school and I never really got why I couldn’t make the case to other people—after all, it’s just a different instrument. (Incidentally, that’s also why I consider Lady Gaga to be of a punk sensibility—she’s making massive amounts of money by being a complete and utter goofball, because that’s just who she is, even if she’s all synths and beat boxes. Gotta respect that.) After all, yes, there’s a lot of cynical and outright crappy pop music out there, but legitimacy is not conferred by your choice of instruments or your background.

The entirety of my distaste for hipsters comes from their fashion sense. The fashion of the 80s sucked in the 80s, no one should bring it back. Really, leggings? They’re awful.

On a more serious note, it’s problematic that hipster fashion (as I understand it) is only wearable by the really young/tiny. (I won’t even call it flatterying to the young/tiny - some of that shit isn’t flattering on anyone.) I’m uncomfortable with the fact that the message seems to be “You don’t have to be anorexic to have this look, but it helps.”

I’ve always seen that lyric as being written in-character as the fat guy in the video, not necessarily representative of Knopfler himself.

Me too. The song is based on - allegedly - actual griping Knopfler heard from department store workers one day.

Thanks for the angle on gender anxiety causing some part of anti-New-Wave bashing. I had always figured it was just another instance of Boomers saying “your music sucks.”

On keyboard hostility:  is it something about the phallic nature of guitar necks?

I mean, besides the horrible timbre that a lot of synths generate.

I think the hipster disdain (and really, it is tough to pin down what we are talking about when using that word) is a bit different than that. Depending on where you live, it can be essentially the ONLY type of fashion worn by a certain age group. I dont see it as particular unusual or offensive. In cases it can be quite nice. But dear lord in heaven, if it isn’t just ubiquitous. I have no doubt Walmart has a hipster section at this point. Stick a fork in it.

I’m of a shirt worn by the ...more unusual folks at my high school. It said, simply, “You are all sheep.” I later learned this shirt was among Hot Topics best sellers.

There’s definitely a fetischization of guitars as the one true instrument going on.

It could also be that there’s a strong connection between electronic music and geeks/nerds.

pink daisy:

Considering the remarkably high level of geekery displayed by people like Les Paul, Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Brian May, you would think that would be more of a false dichotomy.

I don’t actually know many hipsters in real life, so my view of them is disproportionally shaped by widely-known hipster sites like Gawker. So when I hear ‘hipster’, I think of people snarking for the sake of being snarky and being ‘ironically’ sexist/offensive. When I see people wearing hipster fashion I try not to assume they’re like that, and I usually succeed (the same way I try not to assume that a young white guy in a sports jersey isn’t an entitled dickwad).

I never ‘got’ why Duran Duran was so hated either, but it makes total sense. It’s amazing how when girls or women are the majority fanbase of a certain group or genre, it’s ‘objectively’ bad, for no apparent reason (“it’s fluff” doesn’t count). See Twilight (OK, that is objectively bad, but most people accepted it as bad before reading it or analyzing it), romance novels, chick lit, romcoms, etc.

rivki, but how is that different from fashion overall?  in my experience, and obviously YMMV, “hipster” clothing often involves covering more skin and wearing shit like oversized t-shirts than so-called “mainstream” fashion and certainly is a lot more wearable by those of different body types than what you see worn at a standard issue velvet rope club.

I’m thinking of everyday clothing, not clothes meant for clubbing, which does tend to be tight for almost everyone. I guess what I see as “hipster” is skinny jeans/leggings worn as pants and tight, short, statement tee-shirts or tank-tops. With scarves and belts.  A lot of the guys seem to wear jeans that start really low on their hips, which IMO gives them an odd proportion - they look like they’re all torso.

This may be a reflection of geography, I’m in NYC, so hipsters may dress differently elsewhere. I don’t think I see a lot of oversized t-shirts.

A small anecdote - when I was in High School, someone happened to mention the band Journey (yes, that dates me, but…) and the reaction of the resident Heavy Metal Fans was “Journey?  GIRL BAND.”

Also, I seem to remember many people discussing the anti-Disco sentiment with similiar disdain (the involvement of women, minorities, and gays, etc.)

“I think at least part of the backlash stems from a desire by the critics for darker, edgier music.  Duran Duran, for instance, was fairly light and airy.  Compare that to Metalica or Michael Jackson which had much faster, heavier beats.”

Duran Duran had the fortune/misfortune of being a band that is perceived (accurately or not) as being a product of MTV and music videos.  That alone made them “inauthentic” to more traditional bands and fans, and that was a big part of what Mark Knoffler was talking about in Money for Nothing.  Of course, they were far from the only band that rose (and fell) on the wave of music videos.  (Boy George and Culture Club were another great example.)

Videos for music had a similar effect that “talkies” had to silent movies.  All of a sudden, people who had good chops but lacked movie star looks were at a huge disadvantage.  OTOH, having the right kind of look, even with no talent/chops, could still be made to work when music videos ruled the world.  At least for a while…

Metallica was really never a music video band (although they did put out a few).  Michael Jackson, OTOH, was making music videos years before there was any mainstream outlet for them.

These days, when MTV is all about Jersey Shore and other pop-cultural refuse, it’s easy to forget just how new and exciting the idea of music videos really was, back in the day.

***

Now, you kids get off my lawn before I call the cops!...

For the last couple years I’ve been convinced that hipster bashing has a really strong basis in homophobia.  A good 60% of those pics on the hipster-hater websites look like my gay friends dressing up for goofy gay-scene dance nights.  Yeah sometimes the fashion isn’t the best, but not everyone looks their best all the time, even the super fashionable.

Brian: I was talking more about the fanbase than the musicians. While there are geeks in every genre (I think more geeks listen to metal than electronica btw), the chance that a random fan will be a geek is probably much better among synth-people than anywhere else. This could be because the “cool kids” stayed away, but that doesn’t really matter.

The music gossip at the time as I remember it was that the song was about Motley Crue, who at the time were wearing spandex with garters.  But the larger point is valid, with the added twist that it was the Heavy Metal bands who laid the claim as the rightful inheritor of the sixties hippy rebels.

Until I started reading this blog, i had no idea “hipster” was a subculture. None. I thought the word actually just referred a relentlessly contrarian attitude, to being incapable of enjoying something if anyone else is enjoying it too. “Playful” was absolutely the last word I would ever have thought of to associate with what I understood “hipster” to mean.

Some part of me is still boggled that it is apparently a subculture about playfulness and finding things to enjoy. I have no idea how on earth that could possibly be connected to the way I hear the word used in “hipster-bashing.”

I also feel like hipster bashing has an elitist classist edge.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that hipster fashion can be done on the super cheap. I mean, you can say all you want that ‘oh they just buy these pre-packaged outfits for $$$$$ at urban outfitters’ but the reality of the situation is: You don’t know that.  Posers are indistinguishable from the geniune fashion concious and/or poor.  Also, I don’t know any hipsters w/ trust funds.

I thought MikeEss’s link was going to go to Billy Idol or The Ramones. Well, okay, Idol has some talent, but he’s way more about the looks.

I’m sure there is some anti-woman and gay sentiment involved, but the main reason for the backlash against Disco and then some New Wave was that it was everywhere and that it was seen as tame (Duran Duran was, for a short time, much more popular than better music; Disco was more popular than the punk or New Wave of the time). You have to remember that our choices to listen to music back then were fewer (you could get other music if you really tried but in the small town I grew up in, you would have to drive 50+ miles to even get it on the radio). This meant that if we heard Duran Duran 50 times in a day (and this type of thing was typical) then we didn’t hear the Cure or the Ramones or the Feelies or Siouxsie or ... Your point about hipsters might be true, but a hipster of the time wouldn’t have been caught dead listening to Duran Duran or Culture Club.

In terms of the synth/guitar divide, I remember that driven at least in part by the Punks—punk was, partially, a backlash against the increasing complicated arrangements of rock songs and a drive back to short simple songs. For whatever reason, synth was associated with the more involved songs and so disdained by the punks.

Both the Ramones and Billy Idol (Generation X) already had careers before music videos went big time. 

The Ramones were never a bunch of pretty boys, and I don’t think any amount of plastic surgery would have fixed that.  Idol had the right look to take advantage of the new times.

I referenced Milli Vanilli because while it was a shock to some that they were relatively talentless, to many of us it was completely unsurprising.  Had MTV not existed, they would have blown up off-line and disappeared without leaving much trace…

Question from someone who was born in the latter half of the 80’s: Did the New Wavers actually refer to themselves as “New Wave”? Because the common refrain is that hipsters never call themselves such. It’s such a nebulous term that I can never identify what constitutes a hipster, or even if I’m a hipster.

I wish we had all the cheap petroleum back that was wasted on that huge plastic jewelry in the ‘80s. I thought disco was heartless and most New Wave only reminds me of Reagan—which it kind of did at the time. But that’s just elder griping. Go ahead and dance on my lawn, I’m not really using it.

Plus, Hipsters Ruin Everything.

And they always have.

Hipsters are a strange beast, and I tend to doubt you can really tell the difference between your typical broke-ass hipster with hoarding issues and your trustafarian hipster with lots of money who makes a lifestyle out of slumming. For that matter, I don’t think there’s much meaningful distinction between the posers and the real thing—they relate more or less on the same level, sincere or no.

Despite being an uppity little “faggot”, the villain in this song get his chicks “for free”, as if women are a commodity to be purchased.  Sheffield notes that Straits was capturing a popular sentiment at the time.  He describes many straight men being angry and unsettled by New Wave, eager to dismiss their talents and especially their fans.

IMHO, the lyrics denote envy more than resentment.

If the song is taken from the perspective of a “working man”, then there is indeed a strong element of misogyny (women as tokens) and casual homophobia based on appearance.  But what comes through loud and clear is that the perspective character wants to be one of those singers (only not so, you know, faggy, and taking full advantage of the chicks for free).

I always read that particular verse as Knopfler himself having fun at being considered effeminate for singing for a living.  After all, the video’s live scenes involve a underwear-clad hottie prancing around a bedroom intercut with Knopfler doing his Rock God thing.

My wife and I both enjoy new Wave, Synth pop and electronic music and have for a great many years, which is why we can never forget that New Wave was never quite so big back in the day as some people like to think. Anyone who was alive in the 80s will tell you, it was all big hair glam rock and heavy mettle. That was the top of the social order back then.

Boy bands have traditionally been attractive and non-threatening.

I’d like to think that part of the reason Duran Duran was so over-the-top successful (because I am not ashamed to admit I love the shit out of that band) is because they were able to market themselves as not only attractive and non-threatening but also their music videos were about adventure and generally pretty fun and cool. I suspect it was more a cynical ploy to get boy audiences with their over-the-top scifi/adventure themes, but how cool would it be if they captured geek girl hearts everywhere by offering girls something other than just crooning and dancing?

Also, my love of UHF makes it impossible for me to think of the lyrics to the Dire Straights song as anything other than the Beverly Hillbillies theme.

Disco “heartless”? By what standard? Disco was about mixing hedonism and empowerment. You may not necessarily like the music per se, but it was a natural evolution of Philly soul and funk that came out of an underground culture that was racially and sexually diverse in ways that outside society found unacceptable.

...because young women ate it up and wanted to dance and party for their own pleasure…

And it was at this point that my mental Wurlitzer kicked in with Cyndi Lauper, probably the most well-adjusted prominent survivor of the 80’s pop scene.

My mistake.  The video is definitely concentrating on some generic New Age band when that lyric gets sung.

I retire in disgrace.

Piator:

The thing is, envy and resentment aren’t mutually exclusive. You may have heard of “sour grapes”?

@thecynicalromantic

I agree. It’s become difficult to pinpoint what the word “hipster” means anymore, and it seems to vary regionally as well.

It’s an insult 99% of the time, when I hear it. It may not have started as one, but it is now. A lot of people I know who I would classify as hipsters are also the same people who use the word as an insult with abandon. In fact, calling other people hipsters might even be a sign that you are a hipster. Gasp.

I think ALL people are hipsters, at least some of the time, and about something. It’s sort of like how everyone is a nerd about something. I’m using the word “hipster” to mean “elitist,” specifically “elitist about art,” since that’s what it generally seems to mean among the people I know. But that’s not what it means to other people, I guess? I don’t know!

As for “hipster fashion”—it involves wearing clothes ironically, according to the internet stereotype of a hipster. Except that this is a trend that doesn’t really exist. Usually if I see someone in a My Little Pony shirt and ask them about it, they say they legitimately like My Little Pony. Or Journey. Or whatever the “ironic” thing is. They’ll like it genuinely, or at least, nostalgically—or maybe they think it’s funny, but the point is that they still enjoy it enough to support it via clothing. And since when does wearing a silly-looking hat make you into some sort of disdainful jerk? And yet if I see someone in a silly hat, many times my friends will groan and grumble, “UGH, look at that HIPSTER with his HAT.” Wtf?! I just assume the dude likes the hat. Should I instead assume that everyone is making some sort of jaded statement about stupid hats in general? No. That’s ridiculous, and it’s ... well, frankly only a HIPSTER would think that way. :D

I’m not sure that these disdainful people who wear shirts/hats ironically actually exist. Or they exist in such small numbers that it’s not worth thinking about them. (This is something that Overthinking It’s Peter Fenzel talks about sometimes on their podcast, which Amanda has guested on, so she’s probably heard Pete’s thoughts about this.)

But, once again, none of my perceptions of the word “hipster” seem to go along with what Amanda’s talking about. Being into synth pop may make me a hipster, but according to a different hipster, that musical preference would make me NOT a hipster. Is it attitude? Or musical tastes? Or fashion? Or all of these? And if it’s all of these, then why do I see the insult thrown about so non-specifically?

Also: Hipster vs. scenester. And being “emo.” All three describe music/fashion that the Kids These Days seem to be into. And there are careful distinctions between each. Which change daily. ::sigh:: Definitely more confusing than the “goth/preppie/jock/nerd” classifications that I’m used to.

Meanwhile, my parents think of THIS instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_(1940s_subculture)

Also, even Wikipedia agrees with me that contemporary use of the word is vague:

“‘Hipster’ has been used in sometimes contradictory ways, making it difficult to precisely define ‘hipster culture’ ...”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_(contemporary_subculture)

OK. Rant over now.

I always thought that hipster-bashing had something to do with that nonsense about “authenticity.” Hipsters are associated with irony, and irony is inauthentic, dontcha know? Then there’s the tinge of homophobia (skinny jeans on skinny guys). And charges of detachment and elitism (e.g. the idea that hipsters don’t stand for anything, unlike other subcultures). But I think the biggest issue is that, at least in NYC, hipsters are an obvious symbol of gentrification and changes to the fabric of old neighborhoods. Williamsburg has been attracting the creative types for a while, but the hipster migration from the City really made it unrecognizable. Old brooklynites love their Brooklyn history and tradition and now that’s going away. And gentrification is a huge problem. It’s not even really the hipsters’ fault, but they stand out and, to many people, are an obvious symbol of what’s happening in (to?) Brooklyn.

So, yeah, I see hipster-bashing as more about class than gender. The bashing of New Wave did have a ton to do with gender. But does that explain no wavers like Sonic Youth?

Kaje:

New Wave was essentially what you got if you made punk get a shower and a (very strange) haircut. I think that might have been what made people resent it so much—it looked like selling out to the circles they left behind.

Yeah, Knopfler was observing the resentment and envy by some working stiffs toward pop musicians—the character is misogynistic, but not Knopfler and not the song.

As someone who lived thru the New Wave—I was in my early, mid-20s at its peak—it was mainly a marketing label that included a lot of things that didn’t really sit well together. New Wave was term for music that came along about the time the Sex Pistols and the punk movement were imploding. It includes everything from Elvis Costello, Squeeze and Talking Heads to Duran Duran, the Cure and New Order. The term meant pretty much whatever anyone wanted it to mean—in other words, it was close to meaningless.

The thing is, envy and resentment aren’t mutually exclusive. You may have heard of “sour grapes”?

Of course not, but I said envy MORE THAN resentment.

The refrain from the song is “I should have learned to play the guitar, I should have learned to play them drums”.

Myself, I keep thinking “I should have learned to work that forex, I should have learned to sell them CBOs”...

This discussion of hipsters makes me think of this...

@thecynicalromantic #20

I am sort of a hipster basher. I had the view that hipsters were people who were contrarian for the sake of being contrarian and then tried to pass that off for authenticity. Then on Friday, I was at a bar with some friends and a guy that I did not know described me as a “cute hipster chick” and I was all WTF? only to realize that I was wearing skinny jeans, a t-shirt, a brown cardigan i inherited from my grandpa and some chucks. So part of the problem with pinning down anti-hipster sentiment is pinning down just what a hipster is. I have never noticed a gender-essentialism or sexist bent to hipster bashing, but it could just be the crowds I am in.

“I never ‘got’ why Duran Duran was so hated either, but it makes total sense. It’s amazing how when girls or women are the majority fanbase of a certain group or genre, it’s ‘objectively’ bad”

I think alot of it was also trying to understand how women could like guys that wore make-up, at least when I was in middle school in Texas.  Talk about confusing. . . 

As for hipsters, at least they’ll have something to look back on and laugh about, like we do the 80’s.  If it wasn’t for the horrible fashion, we’d only have Reagan, and it’s tough to laugh about what he did.

As someone who lived thru the New Wave—I was in my early, mid-20s at its peak—it was mainly a marketing label that included a lot of things that didn’t really sit well together. New Wave was term for music that came along about the time the Sex Pistols and the punk movement were imploding. It includes everything from Elvis Costello, Squeeze and Talking Heads to Duran Duran, the Cure and New Order. The term meant pretty much whatever anyone wanted it to mean—in other words, it was close to meaningless.

So, kind of like “Alternative” in the 1990s?

Some hipster-bashers may go a bit far…
https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

#45:

Oddly enough, frame it that way, a) the hipsters come out as the sympathetic ones and b) the whole hipster aesthetic comes off as essentially embracing the idea that there isn’t much other than shit out there, so make the most of whatever. That’s actually entirely understandable, and even explains Hot Topic—there’s no authenticity, so just run with whatever’s fun.

“Hipsters are decried, above all other things, for having a playful approach to fashion and a tendency to do things for the hell of it instead of for some supposedly greater, unnamed purpose.”

If Hipsters actually were so playful and motiveless, I think they wouldn’t be so decried (if you want to call a few snarky internet memes decrying.)  However, the view of those who hate on Hipsters is a view that percieves them as (over)privileged white kids who work hard to project an image of frivolity and poverty in order to play at being bohemian.  It’s Haight & Ashbury circa 1970 writ a little larger and a with a little more cynicism.  I don’t think Hipsters get lit up for being free spirits.  I think they get lit up for playing at being free spirits.

Yeah, count me in as pointing out that the lyrics being quoted are taken out of context, and the interpretation is skewed, certainly not supporting the point being made.  The “working guy”, who’s moving refrigerators, color TV’s, and installing microwave ovens, is complaining about singers and musicians in general, and certainly not specifically picking on groups like Duran Duran: male musicians certainly sported earrings before the 1980s, and as for makeup, well, KISS.

Comment #10: Zifnab25 on 09/20 at 05:08 PM

I think at least part of the backlash stems from a desire by the critics for darker, edgier music.

Oh, no, you’ve made me link to TVTropes: True Art Is Angsty.

I think really what it came down to was that girls liked Duran Duran.  I remember that my sister, at around age 14 or 15, stopped liking Menudo and switched to Duran Duran, because Menudo was for younger girls than that, basically.

Comment #8: pink daisy on 09/20 at 05:00 PM

There’s definitely a fetischization of guitars as the one true instrument going on.

I think this takes us back to that entry a few months ago on Silvana’s Tiger Beatdown entry on dude rock.  Upfront guitars are totally a dude rock thing, and for the most part, all other melodic instruments must bow down to them.  Horns?  That’s jazz, which is for art fags.  Hell, I remember I once bought a fretless bass and got funny comments from some of my guy friends.

The vagueness of the concept of hipster is a little problematic.  I kind of just thought that it’s the current term for the same people that would have been either into new wave, goth, or ‘college rock’ back in the 80’s, and ‘alternative’ back in the 90’s.  But even writing this I realize that back in those days there were many sub-subcultures that didn’t always get along, so that makes it hard to classify.

I just recently had a conversation with my sister in law who just got back from China, and was laughing about some hipsters they saw there, and she seems to have a very, very specific idea of what a hipster is and didn’t seem to agree with my more generalized “whatever happens to be bohemian and cutting edge during a given day” definition.

It seemed to me that a lot of music of that time was openly queer, or queer-friendly, much more than I feel about music today: The B-52s, Klaus Nomi, The Pet Shop Boys, Madonna’s nods to gay culture, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Boy George, George Michael, rumors about Michael Stipe, Cyndi Lauper getting on the charts with a song about jilling off to gay porn.

Heh, “hipster” to me is not much about women at all, but dudes with old-man hats and long beards over their vintage getups, riding fixies and drinking Pabst ironically. Which is a nice little privilege-marker; if you grew up with parents who drank Pabst because they couldn’t afford better, you can’t help rolling your eyes.

It’s about the trying-too-hard bit; it’s so…uptight.  To be a hipster is to be worried about hipness, and people overly worried about hipness are no fun to be around. Too many rules, too much insecurity.

I do better with straight-up weird types who don’t fit a genre—too old, too young, too fat, too messed up, too many of the wrong tattoos. People who are incapable of hipness, or only intermittently capable of it.

I think they get lit up for playing at being free spirits.

And therein lies the problem: how the hell can you possibly know that?

Musically, I think all of these terms are really defined by what they’re not, and not what they are. They’re all relative terms that just indicate something different than the mainstream. And yes, I do think hat “New Wave”, “Alternative” and “Hipster” line up in a pretty neat and tidy row stylistically, more or less.

Socially I don’t have very much local contact with hipsters. I think generally i’d like them. Beats seeing one more choad around here ‘tho :(

To be confusing, the term “New Wave” was at first applied to both punk and what we now think of New Wave. For example, both the Ramones and Talking Heads were at first considered New Wave.

Disdain for keyboards?  Yeah, it’s a phallic thing.  Never heard of playing Air Keyboard, have ya?

Also:  Rob Sheffield *is* a great pop music writer!  I loved his reviews for Spin and he wrote a bunch of great stuff about New Wave in Spin’s Guide To Alternative Music (it’s a much better book than the title makes it sound, pretty much a perfect snapshot of a fleeting moment in pop music evolution), an essential guide to all of the obscure strains that defined the idea of “Alternative” when the book came out in 1995.  This is the first I’ve heard of Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, and I’m definitely going to check it out.

I live in one of the most hipseterish neighborhoods in NYC and I can’t define a hipster besides being able to point one out when I see one. If asked to give a working definition, I’d be at a lost.

  Basically, I also think that roboteating at 47 gets the anti-hipster sentiment better than Amanda. A lot of the anti-hipster sentiment is more class-based than gender-based, hipsters are viewed as rich twenty and thirty somethings that are leaving a privileged life off of trust funds. Whether this is true or not is debatable but that is the perception.

  Amanda is more spot on when talking about New Wave and Disco. Anxiety about androgyny is the male equivalent of women feeling anxiety over not looking like a movie star or model. A lot of men, including my brothers and I, aren’t even remotely capable of looking slightly androgynous even if we tried really hard. We just look like men. The fear is that if most women prefer an androgynous look in their men than the more traditionally masculine have no chance in being found attractive by a woman just like how many women have feared that they won’t be able to find a romantic partner if they were less than movie-star perfect.

Hmm, according to my mom who was part of the backlash against disco and still to this day resents it, the backlash was mostly because of how ubiquitous disco was, relegating most of the great bands from that era that we actually remember (and attribute to the 60s) to the pirate radio stations, the underground campus broadcaster, and the like. And that the disco played was at least perceived not as gay (at the time), but rather dominated with sexist straight male energy (see the stereotype of the guy in slicked back hair, chains down his half-open shirt, and hitting on anything that moved and stalking women if they said no). My mom resented it because it made finding things halfway empowering to her as a woman harder to find like Fleetwood Mac.

And I’ll ditto the person earlier who said they thought “Money for Nothing” was bashing hair metal (or capturing the attitude of the backlash to hair metal) rather than New Wave. I always assumed that too, especially with how the lyrics seemed to be mostly bashing hair metal’s tendency to dress with more and more female accoutrements (without looking at all feminine, sometimes less is more) and have such amazing lyrical ability with runs such as:

“I wanna rock!
Rock!
I want to rock!
Rock!”

And was claiming at the time to be the true inheritor of the 60’s “rebel spirit” rather than NWOBHM, punk, or New Wave.

And again, it is always interesting how perceived masculinity of genres or artists both shifts over time and can be reliable belied by the reality of said artists or genre.

Both how disco at the time was viewed as straight male cock power much like Cock Rock today, but now is seen as the big gay sausage fest it was (not bashing big gay sausage fests). Also how Heavy Metal is still viewed as this somehow super masculine straight male land that’s nothing to do with wimpiness or geekiness despite the three most iconic metal bands all being fairly aligned with “feminized masculinity”. By that I mean, Black Sabbath was pretty openly flower child hippie, which isn’t exactly “hardcore”, Iron Maiden were open geeks and pretty much you have to be a geek to follow half their songs because they reference things only a geek would know like cult classic sci-fi novels (Dune), TV Shows (The Prisoner), and poems (Rhime of the Ancient Mariner), and Judas Priest was fronted by a gay male who mainstreamed the then very alternative, very “queer” S&M;fashions more prevalent in the queer communities.

I’m not sure there is a bigger “Ha Ha” out there to the desperation of masculinity and music fandom out there than the realities of that previous paragraph.

emjaybee at 52: The hipster love of beards is one of their best qualities. I’m serious about this, I really like the fact that it is more acceptable for men to grow beards without being seen as red-necky or unfashionable or something. Now if we can only get more bearded leading men.

#39
Ain’t it the truth. I lived through that musical era and the New Wave tag was a marketing label more than anything else. One end of the NW spectrum would loathe the other. I remember the cute “New Romantic” tag being put on many of the groups Amanda is referring to, but it didn’t stick in any meaningful sense.

#49
Don’t sweat it, bass players are always looked at oddly. Horns is also for that awful R&B;music, too. Classism wasn’t the only ism being tossed out there in the ‘80s.

It seemed to me that a lot of music of that time was openly queer, or queer-friendly, much more than I feel about music today: The B-52s, Klaus Nomi, The Pet Shop Boys, Madonna’s nods to gay culture, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Boy George, George Michael, rumors about Michael Stipe, Cyndi Lauper getting on the charts with a song about jilling off to gay porn.

Heh.

As I recall, Freddie Mercury was on mainstream TV with Crazy Little Thing Called Love before mainstream woke up to the implications of this guy in tight black leather strutting around with a carefully gender-balanced set of eye candy dancers…

I dunno - he may have set the moustache and black leather cap gay image.

You could probably find some very interesting things to say about the difference between New Wave and Alternative, though.  You look at pictures of bands like Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, Eurythmics, and Flock of Seagulls and you get that sense of playfulness and fun that Amanda’s talking about.  Then you look at photos of My Bloody Valentine or Nirvana or Velocity Girl, and they look so . . . boring in comparison, fashion wise. 

But I suppose the Alternative bands were more direct descendants of 80’s post punk and early indie rock like Husker Du, X, and Mission of Burma, who were very “anti fashion” and probably looked down their noses at the New Wave bands.

@ Dr. Locrian: “who were very “anti fashion” and probably looked down their noses at the New Wave bands”

I think the idea was that if you took the time to pick out a “stage outfit” you were trying too hard and therefore phony.

I don’t know that I’ve ever been guilty of “hipster bashing”. I’m fairly certain that I’ve never been hip, so maybe subconciously? Like someone said further up the thread, it just reeks of trying too hard.

Piator, no.  Tom of Finland did that.

I’m forever going to be reminded of this when the music of my youth comes up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeCW_u6j8Ps

The VH-1 is a great source of history, but I’m happier with the VH-1 Classic.

@ Mark:  “I think the idea was that if you took the time to pick out a “stage outfit” you were trying too hard and therefore phony.”

Yeah, I think that kind of sums it up.  I graduated from high school in 87 so I remember exactly how Balkanized the different subcultures were back then, much more so than nowadays I think (I could be wrong though).

To generalize and paint with a broad brush, American punk and indie rock bands were much more obsessed with the idea of authenticity than British bands.  The idea was, you were on a stage, but your music was supposed to be a way of somehow expressing only the inner essence of your being.  Playing with your outfits would detract from that goal if you subscribed to that aesthetic.

Whereas I think in the UK, rock always was seen as being much more theatrical, so people didn’t have as much of a problem with cultivating an outrageous look.  I remember that New Wave was seen as a sort of a second “British Invasion” spearheaded by the pretty boys of Duran Duran, and that led to a pretty quick backlash from both the metal heads and the indie rock crowd.

emjaybee at 52: The hipster love of beards is one of their best qualities. I’m serious about this, I really like the fact that it is more acceptable for men to grow beards without being seen as red-necky or unfashionable or something. Now if we can only get more bearded leading men.

Comment #61: Lee on 09/20 at 07:12 PM

I have nothing against beards as beards, Lee—my husband has one (a goatee), and it suits him very well.  Lots of men look hotter with goatees, IMO (Evil Spock! Blackadder!)

But lots of hipster beards are much more of the faux-mountain-man variety, which I’ve never been a fan of. Maybe because the wearers aren’t always so good about the grooming. Seems to be more “old-man/hippie throwback” than “my beard expresses my soul!”.

As for nice long beards, I find retired bikers tend to have the best ones; they take good care of them, occasionally braid them, trim them into shape, and even use a little product. Those are beards I can appreciate also.

/beard derail

emjaybee at 69: Ah okay, I understand your POV. Some of the mountain men beards are a bit silly looking. I like to keep my beard closely trimmed.

I’ve done some hipster-bashing in my time, and I’ll cop to it.  Most of it is deeply and firmly rooted in the hipster penchant for getting so incredibly fucking snotty about things they don’t like.  It’s like, “Okay, we get it, you find this random thing to be the most tragically and painfully uncool thing ever to exist on the face of the planet.  I agree with you and I still wish you would shut the fuck up about it already.” or “Yes, I get it, you think that my tastes are just too hilariously bad for words.  I am of the same opinion about your tastes, but I try not to really belabor it because you appear to enjoy whatever stupid thing you’re into now, and it seems kind of mean to get all taste-police on you.”

Which is a nice little privilege-marker; if you grew up with parents who drank Pabst because they couldn’t afford better, you can’t help rolling your eyes.

Yeah, my observation of hipsterism has been mostly a privileged toying-with things that are usually part of the lives of underprivileged or low-income people. I associate “hipster” with “will pay $45 on etsy for ugly crocheted afghan, the kind your grandma had because she was poor and made it from the scraps of yarn so as not to waste anything and needed to keep warm so as to afford the heating bills, and then display it ironically”. Or “will spend ridiculous amounts on fashion glasses modeled after the ones welfare kids cried over having to wear 20 years ago”. Or “will flock to live in neighborhoods that historically have been lived in by people who can’t afford to live anywhere else”.

That’s what “ironically” seems like to me: like saying “omg isn’t it absolutely zany and HI-larious that someone would actually wear these glasses, so I am going to be hugely clever by wearing them even though we all know I actually have way better taste than that”. It’s like a winking in-joke at the expense of the people who wore those clothes/beards/glasses/hats, drove those cars, rode those bikes, drank that beer before the hipsters got hold of it and made it all ironical.

When I retire I desperately want a biker beard. Braided. With beads.

@ #68

Having graduated in HS in ‘05, I think you are spot on in your observation. At the very least, it seemed it was rare for people to define themselves by what they found entertaining. Far more likely to define yourself and clique by what you did. On my football team we had metal heads, rap lovers, punk guys, and a very intimidating linebacker who listened to frou frou on loop. Taste in entertainment was never a real divider…

Basically, I also think that roboteating at 47 gets the anti-hipster sentiment better than Amanda. A lot of the anti-hipster sentiment is more class-based than gender-based, hipsters are viewed as rich twenty and thirty somethings that are leaving a privileged life off of trust funds. Whether this is true or not is debatable but that is the perception.

I can vouch for this from my ventures down in the Village and the Lower East Side and from what several musician friends who frequently play in that area have said.  The most vehement anti-hipster sentiments IME tended to come from those who grew up in NYC, especially those who are/were working-class. 

Basically, a hipster in their eyes are snobby artsy fashion conscious 20-30 something children of upper/upper-middle class suburbanites who graduated from private liberal arts colleges like the one I attended or the Ivies and are now “slumming” it in NYC while their parents/trust funds are paying the exorbitant rents in places like Chelsea, The Village, Williamsburg, etc.

I don’t think hipster-bashing is about being against a playful sense of fashion. It’s about the forced playfulness that comes with being part of the subculture. A one-upmanship about who can find the most obscure or strange piece of clothing or other item.

If someone buys a crazy hat because they happen to like it than that’s actually playful. If someone is constantly on the lookout for crazier and crazier hats than that’s the opposite of playfulness.

I think this article from the Onion sums it up: http://www.theonion.com/articles/family-unsure-what-to-do-with-dead-hipsters-posses,929/

I’m just saying, no one can tell when looking at someone whether they are ‘authentic’ or not.  Most hipsters I know are lower middle class kids from the midwest who moved to a big city and are artists of some kind.  They drink PBR cause it’s cheap (and not disgusting (to most people)) and wear the same tshirts and baseball caps they have since they were 13.  They don’t go to Supercuts cause they think it’s ironic, (although they take pride in it).  They dress up all awesome & stupid for parties.  What’s wrong with that?  Sure, they’re judgey sometimes, but who the fuck isn’t?

@emjaybee

But lots of hipster beards are much more of the faux-mountain-man variety, which I’ve never been a fan of. Maybe because the wearers aren’t always so good about the grooming. Seems to be more “old-man/hippie throwback” than “my beard expresses my soul!”.

My partner is not a hipster (I don’t think/have no idea really), but he often “sports” the mountain-man beard because he just doesn’t want to bother with the daily grooming shit (for the beard, not like in general).  I don’t really care (I am the awesome-est girlfriend ever and like all his beard/no-beard styles ), but it is nice to have a fashiony-trend that allows being a bit more lax.

I am not getting “but what about the mens” because I don’t really give much of a shit about that, but I do care that I get judged for how he looks.  Since I am apparently supposed to be both his mother and sex-toy, if unkempt beards are totally bad, then I am not taking care of him enough.  Granted, the hipster beard thing hasn’t completely gotten rid of the idea that I’m doing it wrong if he doesn’t look a certain way, but it seems to help a bit.

I also like (and I think is hipster-related, but again don’t really know) that I get lots of compliments on my high school musical theater t-shirts.  I always get asked where I found them, though, and it seems to be way less cool to some people that I earned them than if I’d found them at a thrift store.

As I understand it, keyboards or guitars are the preferred instruments for composing music, because they can do chords.  The thing is that piano is at least perceived to be a sissy instrument that little old ladies give lessons in and that only more privileged people can afford to learn.  Guitar, on the other hand, is all manly and a guy can teach himself to be a rock god on the axe he dug out of the thrift store or something.  (I know that guitar is a complex instrument and not something that you just pick up, but the perception is out there that you can rugged individualist your way to competence with one if you have enough epeen)  So music that is based on piano composition would automatically strike that ‘sissy, effete’ note with some people.  Then you add in all the electronica sort of tricks that can be played with a synthesizer, and you get the computer nerd stuff mixed in.  It’s like a double affront on anxious masculinity.

Another term used is “trustafarian” - and it is used by people on the Left as much as people on the Right.

New Yorkers are open-minded, but sometimes we wonder “why not change your own home towns” - we are already transformed.

you can rugged individualist your way to competence

That is awesome, and I am sure to steal it for my real-life conversations.

Also, as someone who is old enough to remember the ‘80’s as a kid, heavy metal was certainly not “in” and was considered something listened to by White suburban kids who didn’t realize how ridiculous and “sissy” spandex, big hair, and love ballads were*.  Even as a kid, being a metalhead wasn’t cool and by the time I reached high school, metal has been reduced to jokes about tight spandex, big hair, and sappy love ballad lyrics. 

Didn’t hear too much new wave until I was in high school and associated groups like Depeche Mode and Pet Shop Boys as electronic pop bands loved by female classmates.  Kinda interesting considering many friends who now play in bands have strong influences from new wave/post-punk. 

* Ironic considering how friends later got me into Twisted Sister….though a large part of it is the rebellious themes of their music.

Delishka:

The irony is that the relationship is inverted these days—a decently playable guitar will start around $150, whereas you can get a keyboard with everything you need but pressure-sensitive keys for ~$100.

Some of my musician friends hated disco because it meant they were out of a job.  You didn’t need a band at your club, you just played records.

And some people just don’t like the “produced” sound.  I like both produced and raw, but not everyone does.

Delishka: If I’m remembering correctly, a lot of people involved with Western art music (what lay people refer to as classical) think you get weird, in a bad way, results when you compose on guitar rather than piano. Most composers of Western art music are men, so I don’t think a piano is viewed as a feminine instrument exactly.

  exholt at 74: I live in Williamsburg, it has many fine qualities as a neighborhood.

21,000 google hits in the last year alone on hipster + faggot AND (bike OR bicycle). Much the same thing.

Those who make different decisions than the dominant culture demands must be attacked and dismissed. People who do what they’re told don’t like it when they see someone who doesn’t.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=hipster+faggot&as;_epq=&as_oq=bike+bicycle&as;_eq=&num=10&lr;=&as;_filetype=&ft=i&as;_sitesearch=&as_qdr=y&as;_rights=&as_occt=any&cr;=&as;_nlo=&as;_nhi=&safe=images

The thing is that piano is at least perceived to be a sissy instrument that little old ladies give lessons in and that only more privileged people can afford to learn.  Guitar, on the other hand, is all manly and a guy can teach himself to be a rock god on the axe he dug out of the thrift store or something.  (I know that guitar is a complex instrument and not something that you just pick up, but the perception is out there that you can rugged individualist your way to competence with one if you have enough epeen)

Though there is an element of piano being associated with effete, I think the class dimension is far more on the mark.  Most people I knew growing up along with myself always associated the piano as an instrument for those trying to emulate the upper/upper-middle classes and with wet-blanket music snobs who disdained all forms of music made after classical or sometimes the jazz/big band eras.  In short, there is also an element that adopting the piano is associated with excessive conformity to the culture of much older generations….and being an ass-kisser to them in the process by playing “their music”.  Some more progressive friends associated pianos and other classical musical instruments with the “young uptight conservatives” who want to emulate the culture of our grandparents/great-grandparents’ generations. 

The piano also has the image of being associated with talented virtuosos such as my friends and college classmates in the conservatory which meant that the instrument was also seen as being nearly impossible to become competent in unless one takes years of expensive lessons and practices 10 hours/day or is a talented genius like some piano majors I knew or Lang Lang. 

On the other hand, guitar…especially the electric has been associated much more with being easier to pick up without long periods of expensive lessons and has the image that anyone who puts in the time and effort can become passable at it….whether this is actually true or not. 

This factor along with the fact a guitar/especially a solid-body electric takes up far less space, is far less expensive/time consuming to obtain/maintain, and can be transported much more easily with practice amp for practice jam sessions are reasons why I’ve recently picked up this instrument to learn on after dreaming about it since high school.  Considering a conservatory classmate’s violin or other classical musical instrument can easily run $15000 or more for a model deemed “minimally acceptable”, paying several hundred for a used American-made solid-body electric guitar with a practice amp is a bargain.

As an old fart who’s been thinking about making a quilt with all those musical-theatre tee shirts, I’m mystified by all of this. “Playful” was once again never an adjective that would have occurred to me. More like “You really think doing this makes you cool?”

You silly youngsters! Knopfler was repeating, nearly verbatim, the rantings of some appliance sales/installation guys watching MTV in a store!

I caught my son, who regularly appears in a piano tie, Brian Setzer pompadour, and composes for synth and piano, studying my 1982-84 high school yearbooks for clothing ideas.

Ugh.

Delishka:

The irony is that the relationship is inverted these days—a decently playable guitar will start around $150, whereas you can get a keyboard with everything you need but pressure-sensitive keys for ~$100.

Depends on your definition of “decently playable”.  On CL, saw plenty of used guitars…especially electrics that my long-time guitar player friends would consider worlds better than the starter guitars they used as kids/teens for under $100. 

Don’t know about keyboards, but one keyboard playing friend said she wouldn’t touch anything under $1000 as she’s had issues with their tactile response and longevity.

I caught my son, who regularly appears in a piano tie, Brian Setzer pompadour, and composes for synth and piano, studying my 1982-84 high school yearbooks for clothing ideas.

Ugh.

Ha! Had a chance to view the yearbook of a fellow alum from our high school who graduated around the same time.  Took so much pleasure poking fun at the fashion and hair choices he and his classmates had back then…..so satisfying after he poked much fun at my age group for our love of pop-punk groups like Green Day and Offspring and for “looking ugly and unkempt”.

I’m laughing because I always thought the lyric was “Money for nothing/CHECKS for free”!  It made sense, right?  Money and checks?

exholt at 74: I live in Williamsburg, it has many fine qualities as a neighborhood.

Not knocking Williamsburg at all in my comment back there. 

Was mainly referring to how my friends disdained hipsters who made much of their cool while living “on their own” in neighborhoods like Williamsburg fully subsidized by their parents….especially considering that their artsy/day jobs were such that there was no possible way in hell they could have afforded the rents in the buildings they were living….much less actually buy a condo unit in that area as some of them had.

@paul

As an old fart who’s been thinking about making a quilt with all those musical-theatre tee shirts, I’m mystified by all of this. “Playful” was once again never an adjective that would have occurred to me. More like “You really think doing this makes you cool?”

Maybe the hipster response is “Why wouldn’t it?”

As others said, Knopfler was actually writing what someone else was saying.  He was among other things portraying the common belief that musicians and other artists don’t actually work.  They call it playing music, right?  They look like they’re having fun.

If you really thought he actually copped the attitude he wrote about, you’d have to assume he’s racist because of another line, “banging on the bongos like a chimpanzee.”

Knopfler said later, “In fact, I’m still in two minds as to whether it’s a good idea to write songs that aren’t in the first person, to take on other characters.”

@PWI

Guys who play piano?  One name : Barry Manilow, of course - gay, gay, gay!

Proving your point: Liberace? Elton John?

Not so much: Ray Charles?  Harry Connick, Jr.? Tom Lehrer? Stevie Wonder?

I think it is less that the women who play the piano are ignored because they play a female instrument as it is that they are ignored just for being female.

That’s what “ironically” seems like to me: like saying “omg isn’t it absolutely zany and HI-larious that someone would actually wear these glasses, so I am going to be hugely clever by wearing them even though we all know I actually have way better taste than that”. It’s like a winking in-joke at the expense of the people who wore those clothes/beards/glasses/hats, drove those cars, rode those bikes, drank that beer before the hipsters got hold of it and made it all ironical.

This was exactly my experience with what I consider modern hipsterism when we used to go to a lot of concerts in NY around the millennium. There was a whole level of people devoted to being “ironically” ugly.

The thing is, kitsch is more powerful than irony. When I was in film school a hundred years ago, I absolutely adored Ed Wood, and one of my films was made in homage/parody of his style. I quickly realized that you can’t parody kitsch, you can only celebrate it, since “real” kitsch and intentional over the top kitsch are visually indistinguishable.

Same with ironically ugly.

Also, as someone who is old enough to remember the ‘80’s as a kid, heavy metal was certainly not “in” and was considered something listened to by White suburban kids who didn’t realize how ridiculous and “sissy” spandex, big hair, and love ballads were*.

I must be a bit older than you. I was also one of those white suburban kids, and Ozzy was The Biggest Fucking Thing when I was 14.

The irony of ironic is that although PBR is kinda crap, a lot of people do manage to rock the vintage clothes and cheezy glasses.

I have extensive anthropological experience with the East Atlanta version of the hipster and it is a sign of my advanced age that I loathe them viscerally. I believe I have good reasons for doing so: comments 47, 71 and especially 75 encapsulate this well. It’s the contrast between “Look at my crazily hideous hat!” and “Any REAL artist like me wouldn’t care if you looked.” Maybe on a few people that’s an interesting way of expressing the postmodern condition, but the overwhelming majority are lemmings just like the Baby Boomers were and still are.

The precise thing that annoys me to the point of contemplating homicide is the way in which all of them will disdain consumer capitalism until the cows come home yet will rush out and purchase the latest fad item just to prove how above it all they are. The fixed-gear bike is a perfect example of this: I bike to work and all over town, and in a very hilly place like Atlanta, the damned things are totally counterproductive. Yet every. last. one. of the EAV hipsters has one and will go on and on about how wonderful it is. No, it’s not, dude: it sucks. And, you paid three times as much for it as you would for a decent street bike.

One of the funniest moments I’ve had in the last couple of years was at a barbecue that was half overweight Republicans dressed like giant infants in bright pastels and half hipsters in things that they would have paid pennies for had they actually bought them in thrift stores. The hipsters were just seething at the gaucherie of the other group for being such a bunch of conformists, but all of the hipsters looked exactly the same, too.

The thing is that piano is at least perceived to be a sissy instrument that little old ladies give lessons in and that only more privileged people can afford to learn.

One of the notable things I noticed about keyboard magazines in the late 80s was the relative lack of ‘dick-swinging’ compared to guitar magazines of the era.

Delishka: If I’m remembering correctly, a lot of people involved with Western art music (what lay people refer to as classical) think you get weird, in a bad way, results when you compose on guitar rather than piano.

It’s more because keyboard instruments, and then later, their replacement, the piano, became more desirable to the middle-class and the guitar was looked at as something more like something gypsies or other kind of ‘low folks’ would play.

The composer Berlioz was almost unique among composers of the era in that he never had any piano lessons, but learned to play the flagolet and later the guitar, the latter on which he became a virtuoso.

Some commentators have even pointed out to Berlioz’s handling of harmony and chords as similar to that for a guitar, and he even played an excerpt from his “Symphonie Fantastique”  for a friend of his on a guitar.

The first figure to bring the guitar into the classical realm was Fernando Sor

Paris, London, and Moscow

Having completely abandoned his family’s ideal of a military or administrative post, Sor could finally give music a serious try in France. He gained renown at first as a virtuosic guitarist and composer for the instrument. When he attempted composing for operas, however, he was rejected by the French as a composer. His Op. 7 was a large and strange piece, strangely notated in three clefs, and no guitarist at the time could play it. Since France was no longer supportive of his music, Sor decided to try his talents elsewhere.

In 1815, he went to London, England, to attempt to build a stronger music career there. Again, he started to gain considerable fame as a guitarist, and even gave guitar and voice lessons. Since ballet in London was a more popular genre than opera, Sor decided to try his hand at this new area of music. He began to have considerable success this time, especially with his ballet Cendrillon, the most successful of his works in its own day. [4]

It also has different demands on the performer vs. the piano.

I had a friend who was a guitar performance major, and he said that because of the nature of the instrument, ‘sight-reading’ was something that only virtuosi such as John Williams the guitarist, or the late Andres Segovia can do, while I’ve met lots of pianist who were quite good at sight reading which isn’t one of my great strengths as a keyboardist  

@ #101

Along the lines of that party, I have found wearing a pastel polo and top-siders to a hipster coffee shop is the best way to get a thousand hipster death stares of judgment.

@37elena:

I know, my husband and I are living in a really great part of Brooklyn, one without hipsters yet!  But we are terrified of the day when all the 80 year-old Russians are done dying and the wave comes in.  The nice bakery, butcher shop, fish store, flower shop, the dozen little produce shops all replaced by Whole Foods.  The quaint little shops replaced by American Apparel (or Urban Outfitters, whatever).  And the Russian cafés replaced by Think® Coffee.

I’m apparently the perfect age, since I’ve been bashed as both a New Waver and a hipster.  Granted, the guy who sneeringly called me a “New Waver” in high school was behind the times so far I was surprised he had any idea where that term came from.  I was like, “What is this? 1984?”  But still, I’m pissing off the squares coming and going.

If Hipsters actually were so playful and motiveless, I think they wouldn’t be so decried (if you want to call a few snarky internet memes decrying.) However, the view of those who hate on Hipsters is a view that percieves them as (over)privileged white kids who work hard to project an image of frivolity and poverty in order to play at being bohemian.

That’s the rationalization, sure.  But it so often comes from people, in my experience, who are expressing not a little insecurity with that. 

I think the comments upthread about how hipsters destabilize easy class classifications are more on point.  Saying they’re all rich is simply, bluntly untrue.  In fact, a lot of things take off as street trends and fashion because broke musicians and their friends can afford it: cheap beer, thrift stores.  Pretending that everyone you see drinking a Pabst is secretly rich—-when the opposite is true—-is a way of suggesting that you’re owed more obvious signifiers of who has money and who doesn’t.

While there is some substance to the ‘girls music’ derision, the main reason Duran Duran were critically reviled at the time is because they attempted to equate preening and exclusivity with depth in a laughably pretentious way, and without any substance to their lyrics or art whatsoever. Exactly like hipsters today in other words.

This was especially galling since they ran counter to acts like the Specials, the Jam and the Clash who were politically engaged and who actually put in a lot of work with causes such as Rock Against Racism. There’s a really famous Paul Morley article from the time (I can’t find a link online unfortunately) where he interviews them as a race riot was going on a few blocks away and all they can talk about is how many records they want to sell and how they want to meet Princess Di. That’s not to say their music wasn’t great because it often was, but new romanticism in general was a movement which fetishized shallowness and artifice over substance and Duran Duran stand at its peak.

I associate “hipster” with “will pay $45 on etsy for ugly crocheted afghan, the kind your grandma had because she was poor and made it from the scraps of yarn so as not to waste anything and needed to keep warm so as to afford the heating bills, and then display it ironically”.

Again, it’s fascinating that 5% of people are being held up as the example to bash the other 95%. 

Thrift stores and cheap beer, I promise you, took off because people who are “hipsters” are often young and low on funds.  I didn’t drink Pabst in punk bars to show off my cred.  I drank it because it was $1 a can, and I could afford that.  I still shop in thrift stores mainly because it’s a way to get quality clothes that are unique without breaking the bank.

But a few rich people like the aesthetic and borrow it, and suddenly there’s a rationalization for tying up larger anxieties about hipness into something more socially, bashing the rich.  Most of the people you bash aren’t.

@93exholt:

While some of that is true, some of that is not.  Some of these kids live eight-to-a-loft in Williamsburg, can’t afford anything more expensive than Pabst, eat Ramen noodles, don’t get any money from their parents, either because parents are broke, or because they don’t want to give them money to pursue such frivolous goals.  It’s unfair to color all these kids (God, I can’t believe I am calling anyone “kid”, but these kids seem so naive sometimes) the same when some are genuinely talented and committed.  But the bottom line remains that if and when (mostly when) they don’t make it as artists, poets, musicians or writers, they will go back to school, and become doctors and lawyers and business executives.

The interesting thing about keyboards as “feminized” is that in hip-hop, which in its harder forms may be even more testosterone-poisoned than hard rock and punk sometimes are, one of the most defining instruments is the MIDI pad. Admittedly, this is probably an accident of history given hip-hop’s roots in sampling and turntablism, but it does turn the entire idea of “electronic = wimpy” on its head.

@PWI

If you’re right (and I personally have never really heard the piano is gay thing), I think it may be that the recent dramatic increase in women artists playing the piano devalued the piano.  I don’t think it was always that way.  Regina Spektor and Tori Amos may have succeeded in feminizing the piano, but that doesn’t mean the piano was always feminine.  I would argue that for your example of Barry Manilow, he isn’t “gay” because he plays a piano, he is “gay” because his primary audience is female.  While Harry Connick, Jr. may not be Mr. Manly Man’s cup of tea, he is definitely much more good ol’ boy than Liberace-esque.  Male comedian-pianist/musicians (like Lehrer, but also Zach Galifianakis and Victor Borge) definitely challenge the pianos = non-masculine music thing because being funny is still mostly a male thing (despite so much evidence to the contrary).

Thrift stores and cheap beer, I promise you, took off because people who are “hipsters” are often young and low on funds.  I didn’t drink Pabst in punk bars to show off my cred.  I drank it because it was $1 a can, and I could afford that.  I still shop in thrift stores mainly because it’s a way to get quality clothes that are unique without breaking the bank.

Amanda,

That’s not the working definition of “hipster” the way my friends who play in bands on the lower east side and other areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn use it.  The way they use it is artsy overly pretentious upper/upper-middle class suburbanite transplants who are “slumming” it in NYC while “always looking perfect” after graduating from a small private liberal arts college/Ivy type school while living in apartments/condos whose rents/condos are completely all paid for by the parents/trust fund.

I really haven’t the foggiest idea about percentages here. Can’t imagine how I would.

I think another big part of it is the overcompensation thing. If you’re like me, it is tough not to laugh at a guy driving a hummer with uber-masculine bumper stickers. Kind of the same thing with a late 20’s fashion slave who spouts Pitchfork like it is the bible. One suspects high school wasn’t too fun for this fellow.

But even then, I can’t fathom people actually hating them. Or really caring all that much. And PBR is actually not too shabby. Of course, you can get Trader Joe’s beer for $2.99. Beat that.

@113 exholt,

You know, the world we live in places a really high value on being able to give one’s children the best possible life.  Parents will work their butts off all their lives so the kids can get an expensive education, corrective treatment for their crooked teeth and acne, contacts instead of frames, gowns for their parties, computers to do homework in.  I feel like being resentful at some kids just because their parents are better positioned to give them a leg up is counterproductive.  Some of us weren’t as lucky, but we were still luckier than some. 

Sorry, derailing…

Is a keytar gay or straight?  Or is it the first bisexual musical instrument, which probably makes it worse?

exholt, what you’re saying then is that “hipster” to you is awful by definition, like “asshole”.  I humbly disagree.  “Hipster” is a bashing term precisely so people can feel authentic, but that makes it a moving target.  Outside of hipsters using “hipster” as a term to bash other hipsters they don’t think are the exact right kind of hip, the word means roughly what it always has: hip kids into a punk/indie/bohemian aesthetic.

Also, the vast majority of trust fund kids I’ve met were preppy.

the instrument was also seen as being nearly impossible to become competent in unless one takes years of expensive lessons and practices 10 hours/day or is a talented genius like some piano majors I knew or Lang Lang. 

If by ‘competent’ you mean a concert pianist or Professor of Performance with a tenured position teaching undergrads and graduate students, yes.

My piano teacher in college said that she needed at least 2 hours a day when she was studying, and most piano virtuosi, with rare outiers on either side of the numbers, usually find 3 to 6 hours of practice enough.

10 hours is when you start getting bleeding from the fingertips, in the Russian school of pianism, or are trying to make up for lost time in a few years.

Oh, and in the Russian school, you then bandage your fingertips with gauze and press on.

On keyboard hostility:  is it something about the phallic nature of guitar necks?

Whenever someone mentions the idea of the guitar as a phallic symbol I always think of this album cover.

‘Hipster’ is basically synonymous with ‘poser’, it’s just a catch-all term officially linking it with youth culture in general. Also Amanda, despite (actually because of) your statements to the contrary, I don’t think you can be considered a hipster in any real sense of the term since every hipster I’ve ever come across practically gags at the description. Also, your hair and clothes are too tasteful and aren’t linked sufficiently enough to art/boutique fashion/magazine trends.

exholt, what you’re saying then is that “hipster” to you is awful by definition, like “asshole”.  I humbly disagree.  “Hipster” is a bashing term precisely so people can feel authentic, but that makes it a moving target.  Outside of hipsters using “hipster” as a term to bash other hipsters they don’t think are the exact right kind of hip, the word means roughly what it always has: hip kids into a punk/indie/bohemian aesthetic.

Actually, am picking up this definition from musician friends who resented them for being overly pretentious, overt displays of classism against them, and for driving them out of the neighborhoods they grew up in.  This resentment is strongest among the musician friends who are from working-class backgrounds as they were the ones most victimized by this and other displays of classist privilege from them. 

The term hipster was nebulous to me until I started hearing their rants and their explanations when I asked.

raspberryjamba  @104, are you in Brighton/Coney Island? I moved from NYC in 2003, but all my family is still in the area. That place hasn’t changed since I lived right where Coney Island Ave runs into the boardwalk (in 1991).  I was just there a few weeks ago and it’s the same as it always was; same stores, same restaurants, same Russian grannies parked on the same benches along the same boardwalk. It’s just hipster-resistant for some reason. I think most first-gen Russian immigrants who came over as kids (like I did) have a love/hate relationship with that place. We leave and our parents just keep going to Tatiana’s.

10 hours is when you tell people you practice 10 hours but in reality spend most of that time doodling on your instrument thinking about playing video games, witty retorts to yesterday’s hurtful comments from peers or how much you suck.

If by ‘competent’ you mean a concert pianist or Professor of Performance with a tenured position teaching undergrads and graduate students, yes.

My piano teacher in college said that she needed at least 2 hours a day when she was studying, and most piano virtuosi, with rare outiers on either side of the numbers, usually find 3 to 6 hours of practice enough.

10 hours is when you start getting bleeding from the fingertips, in the Russian school of pianism, or are trying to make up for lost time in a few years.

Among the piano majors at my undergrad, there was a widespread perception that they all had to practice a minimum of 8-10 hours a day just to remain competitive with their classmates due to the cutthroat atmosphere in the department or they’ll fail to maintain minimum standards and be dropped from the program.  An atmosphere which was fostered and encouraged by some of the senior departmental faculty.  It was one reason why they had to lock down my dorm’s piano after 9-10 each night to prevent resident piano majors or those from nearby dorms from continuing to practice into the wee hours of the morning and thus, disturb the sleep/studying of everyone else in the dorm.

Dark Avenger @120 and 121, I had a friend in Russia who was a classically trained concert pianist, a real prodigy. She was extremely careful of doing anything that might damage her fingers. She wasn’t allowed to play volleyball in gym and she never so much as lit a stove for fear of burns. She definitely wouldn’t have played the piano till her fingers bled! But that was in the 80s, not sure if earlier generations were more hardcore. She did hate it and switched to jazz guitar right after her first big concert at age 16.

Oh, and in the Russian school, you then bandage your fingertips with gauze and press on.

That sounds more like the Napolean Retreating From Russia school.  I’m not sure they took a piano along with them, although I kinda doubt it.

@125 elena:
YES!  It’s awesome here!  The beach, the train, the shops, Coney, the Aquarium, the Cyclones, the Brooklyn Public Library, etc.  We so lucked out.
I hope you are right and it never changes.  To get to a fast-food joint from here, I have to take the train.  I don’t want a Pinkberry® on my walk to the train station.

You know, the world we live in places a really high value on being able to give one’s children the best possible life.  Parents will work their butts off all their lives so the kids can get an expensive education, corrective treatment for their crooked teeth and acne, contacts instead of frames, gowns for their parties, computers to do homework in.  I feel like being resentful at some kids just because their parents are better positioned to give them a leg up is counterproductive.  Some of us weren’t as lucky, but we were still luckier than some.

My musician friends’ resentment of the “hipsters” comes from their pretentiousness, classist attitudes/behaviors against them, and the perception that their presence caused rents to skyrocket pushing them out of their childhood neighborhoods.  Am mainly relaying their working definitions from their anti-hipster rants. 

My only dog in this hunt is that I can relate to their rants from having encountered the pretentiousness and classist attitudes myself when I attended undergrad with them as a scholarship student.  Only difference between my friends and I is that they encounter them far more often because of their band related activities and from frequenting many of the hipster dominated neighborhoods because they grew up there or nearby.

raspberryjamba, it’s an awesome location, so it’s a nice surprise that it’s not becoming more desirable and, thus, more expensive. I think my people have colonized the area so thoroughly, it became a bit intimidating to non-Russian speakers.

But it’s been that way and known as “Little Odessa” since the first big wave of Soviet Jewish immigration in the 70s. They probably ended up there because the area was already heavily Jewish and immigrant. I’m sure one day it’ll become “cool,” but hopefully not soon.

While some of that is true, some of that is not.  Some of these kids live eight-to-a-loft in Williamsburg, can’t afford anything more expensive than Pabst, eat Ramen noodles, don’t get any money from their parents, either because parents are broke, or because they don’t want to give them money to pursue such frivolous goals.  It’s unfair to color all these kids (God, I can’t believe I am calling anyone “kid”, but these kids seem so naive sometimes) the same when some are genuinely talented and committed.  But the bottom line remains that if and when (mostly when) they don’t make it as artists, poets, musicians or writers, they will go back to school, and become doctors and lawyers and business executives.
Comment #110: raspberryjamba on 09/20 at 10:47 PM

You know, just because someone has a trust fund or her parents have money, doesn’t mean they don’t have talent or drive.  Some rich kids are genuinely talented and committed. 

Sure, it’s unfair that they get breaks that kids who aren’t rich don’t get, but that doesn’t mean that rich kids have no soul.

But that was in the 80s, not sure if earlier generations were more hardcore. She definitely wouldn’t have played the piano till her fingers bled!

I should’ve stated that these were “old school” pianists in a tradition that pre-dated the formation of the Soviet Union, when piano virtuosity was much more prized than it is now.

One example was Alexander Scriabin, who ended up writing two pieces for the left hand alone during a time when he temporarily crippled his right hand due to overpracticing:

Scriabin later studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Anton Arensky, Sergei Taneyev, and Vasily Safonov. He became a noted pianist despite his small hands, which could barely grasp a ninth. Feeling challenged by Josef Lhévinne, he seriously damaged his right hand while practicing Liszt’s Don Juan Fantasy and Balakirev’s Islamey.[4] His doctor said he would never recover, and he wrote his first large-scale masterpiece, the F minor sonata, as a “cry against God, against fate.” It was his third sonata to be written, but the first to which he gave an opus number (his second was condensed and released as the Allegro Appassionata, Op. 4).

Since most Russian pianists were men, there was also an air of
“macho suffering in the service of art” involved as well, but Horowitz was the last Russian pianist who did that sort of thing.

that they all had to practice a minimum of 8-10 hours a day just to remain competitive with their classmates due to the cutthroat atmosphere in the department or they’ll fail to maintain minimum standards and be dropped from the program.

That could be because in your time frame there was, as now, a lot more international competition than when I went to school, but I’d be more interested into how much the professors you mention did practice themselves.

It could’ve also been a matter of control, because there’s no way in hell you can tour or even teach piano if you have to practice 8 hours a day unless you can forgo sleep as well, so it sounds more sadistic than useful.

The only time I’ve heard or limits on practicing as you’ve described was in the German town of Weimar, when Franz Liszt lived and gave free classes, individual and group, there was a law passed forbidding piano playing with a window open.

My hometown piano teacher always held that you had a piece of music ready for performance when you could play it three times without any mistakes.

I dunno, a lot of hipster bashing is done by hipsters themselves, either because “trying too hard” is seen as a negative, or like adjectives like “stylish”, “intriguing”, and “accomplished”, you can’t effectively imbue yourself with the title, you have to wait for other people to identify you in that way. Also, didn’t girls make the Beatles?

That could be because in your time frame there was, as now, a lot more international competition than when I went to school, but I’d be more interested into how much the professors you mention did practice themselves.

It could’ve also been a matter of control, because there’s no way in hell you can tour or even teach piano if you have to practice 8 hours a day unless you can forgo sleep as well, so it sounds more sadistic than useful.

My impressions are that it’s both with control being a major part. 

A few friends in particular described how there were some senior faculty who thrived on fostering an atmosphere of fear and unhealthy competition among the students in the program….and sometimes took pleasure in eliminating the “weakest students”. 

Saddest thing is that this takes place considering the competition to even gain admission into the Conservatory is already extremely keen considering it is well-known in classical-musical circles around the world.  Sometimes to the point that it is much more famous than the college as I’ve often found when asked where I went to college only to be asked “What instrument do you play?”*

* I cannot wait to see the reactions of those who ask now that I’ve picked up the electric guitar.  I can only imagine the same shudders, shock, and disgust I saw in the classical music snobs in my extended family and high school classmates once they heard me play Green Day and Offspring on my laptop instead of Mahler, Beethoven, and Bach.

Hipsters used to wear Mao caps and may still wear stingy brim hats. Irony is a factor: A hipster wouldn’t wear a Che T-shirt, but he would wear a T-shirt depicting Che wearing a Che T-shirt. (idea stolen to make the point).

Oh, and a “faggot” is any guy that chicks willingly chat with. Real men socialize only with other guys.

Is a keytar gay or straight?  Or is it the first bisexual musical instrument, which probably makes it worse?

The keytar is an artifact of the cool/cheesy ‘80s depending on your perceptions and how they were employed in music/music video.

Hipsters used to wear Mao caps and may still wear stingy brim hats. Irony is a factor: A hipster wouldn’t wear a Che T-shirt, but he would wear a T-shirt depicting Che wearing a Che T-shirt. (idea stolen to make the point).

Barring a few campus/local Marxist/Maoist wannabes….the Mao caps and Che/Che derived T-shirts have not been in widespread fashion for nearly a decade.  This means that they may be due for a revival….

Heck, the actual Marxists/Maoists I know are so disgusted by how they’ve been co-opted by US/Western consumer culture that they wouldn’t be caught dead in public with them…..

Kinda similar to how when I visited China in the late ‘90s, nearly everyone who purchased Mao caps, Red books, and other Maoist paraphernalia were Western tourists…..including *ahem*...yours truly.

Keyboards are just for wimping music down.  “Weren’t Rush and Led Zeppelin much better before they started using synthesizers?” is still a common sentiment.

What’d they say? “Man, Led Zeppelin was great, until they wimped out and started using keyboards on side two of their first album.” Gak, people are stupid.

I think the problem here is that a lot of people are working from two different definitions of ‘hipster’, because there’s definitely two different groups.

First wave hipsters:  People who are generally very creative, and often fairly broke. Occasionally they wind up somewhat clustered in cheaper, not-terribly-desirable areas, where they build communities that are often quite vibrant and interesting.  When that happens, its rather inevitably followed by:

Second wave hipsters:  People who rarely have any discernible talent beyond their skill at choosing to have wealthy parents.  Because they view the creative people as ‘cool’, they essentially start buying their way into the previously established first-wave hipster community. Before you know it, land value in the area increases massively, development pushes out most of the original people living there as well as all the mom-and-pop stores, leaving nothing but swathes of coffee shops that don’t actually sell coffee, only $7.50+ espressos, where people can sit while using their brand-new Apple products (whatever you do, DO NOT enter carrying a PC product unless you’re willing to risk being sneered to death.)

First-wave hipsters are generally great people, and fun to hang around with. The second-wave hipsters, on the other hand, are mostly self-involved assholes who consider themselves VERY cool due to the lifestyle they’ve bought their way into (and utterly destroyed by having done so.)

So are we all in agreement that Duran Duran was/is primarily a girl’s band (whatever that means, what with there not being any women in the band). Because that’s not how I remember things at all.

Just to add a bit more to what I said before about first- and second-wave hipsters: When someone uses the term ‘hipster’, I definitely think of the second group. That’s because, I think, they’re the only ones who actually THINK of themselves as being part of a group. First-wave hipsters are generally just doing their own thing. They usually don’t see themselves as part of a ‘cultural movement.’  Second-wavers, on the other hand, DEFINITELY think of themselves as part of a group. That’s pretty much what their life is defined as - trying to fit into a group that they think they should be a part of (except with fewer poor people and other riff-raff.)

This process is pretty much a continuous one.  Its gone on AT LEAST back to the beatniks - the names just change every decade or so.  Creative people are creative, rich people who wish they were creative steal it. And life goes on…

@136: Selena777 “Also, didn’t girls make the Beatles?

Yes they did, and they got it too. I rented their Anthology movie, and a reporter was interviewing a guy at a Beatles concert and asked him if he wasn’t embarrassed to be into something that’s for girls. I forget exactly what the guy said, but it was essentially no a good band is a good band. But the crowd looked about 97% female.
There was a big effort to discredit the Beatles initially, and the effort revolved around mocking them as being a girls’ band.

10: Zifnab25

I think at least part of the backlash stems from a desire by the critics for darker, edgier music.  Duran Duran, for instance, was fairly light and airy.  Compare that to Metalica or Michael Jackson which had much faster, heavier beats.

Micheal Jackson got a massive raft of shit. Even before Off The Wall somebody started a rumor he’d had, or was planning to have, a “sex change operation” and was engaged to marry a guy. And that joke, “Why did Michael Jackson go to Walmart? He heard boys pants were half off.” It was originally K-Mart, and was a generic homophobic joke that had his name inserted into it. I heard it in the mid-1970s from white boys making fun of me for being a fan of his, being little race/gender cops.

I think at least part of the backlash stems from a desire by the critics for darker, edgier music.  Duran Duran, for instance, was fairly light and airy.  Compare that to Metalica or Michael Jackson which had much faster, heavier beats.

I was a “Durannie” in the 80’s, and you know what I find funny? So many of the people I knew who were into Duran Duran later got into punk - some of my friends and I had a theory that somehow, Duran Duran was the gateway drug that led to punk.

The kids who were listening to mainstream music in the 80s mercilessly mocked those of us who weren’t, and bands that are nostaglically referenced were often not very popular. I was derided for liking The Cure and The Violent Femmes.

Also, I was 13 when I saw a picture of John Taylor, and I fell in love with his pretty, pretty face. So the music was not really what I was interested in (although he really can play the bass).

I’m not sure how I went from Duran Duran to The Clash, but that’s where I went, along with so many of my friends.

I buy into Amanda’s argument that some hipster backlash is the lack of class distinctions, or is at least plausibly.  The assertion that most, or even a decent chunk of, hipsters are supported by wealthy parents is complete rubbish, though that may vary depending on where you live.  (Being poor, living in a poor neighbourhood, I’m exposed to poor hipsters.  Quelle suprise!)  I’m probably more or less a hipster, and being poor, I dress like my grandfather.  If I had a trust fund, I’d probably dress like my great great great grandfather.  (I would be all over top hats, monocles, waistcoasts, pocketwatches and kilts if I could afford them.  Ah well.)  But there’s a lot of contempt for trying to hard to be a hipster, since a lot of it is disdaining trying to be hip.

Didn’t Duran Duran write their own songs?

Yes, Duran Duran wrote their own songs, and any band that can come up with ‘The Chauffeur’ is all right by me.

maurinsky at #148: Me too! Durannie in the 80s, which led me to all sorts of music, including tracking down Bowie bootlegs at used record stores. Of course, I also abused Aqua-Net in those times as well. I still listen to Duran Duran today—they cheer me up when I’m blue.

I’m too old to be a hipster, but I’m endlessly amused by the girls wearing tiered lace skirts that I remember from my wannabe Valley girl days! If I hadn’t worn out my 80s clothes, I’d sell them at a thrift store!

Duran Duran was one the best bands of the decade, hands down.  I don’t care if they weren’t as political as the Clash—like them or not, you have to admit they had a distinct sound.  They consciously tried to mix Chic and the Sex Pistols, and for the most part (up until Arena) it worked.  Hell, you could argue that they influenced the Clash a bit, given how much synth was used on Combat Rock, and Big Audio Dynamite was pretty darned dance oriented.

And lyrically, come one, you gotta love Simon Le Bon Bons like:

“There’s a dream that strings the road, with broken glass for us to hold”

“Darken the city, night is a wire.  Steam in the subway, earth is afire”

“Swim seagull in the empty sky, on towards that western isle”

“voices in your body coming through on the radio”

First wave hipsters:  People who are generally very creative, and often fairly broke. Occasionally they wind up somewhat clustered in cheaper, not-terribly-desirable areas, where they build communities that are often quite vibrant and interesting.  When that happens, its rather inevitably followed by:

Second wave hipsters:  People who rarely have any discernible talent beyond their skill at choosing to have wealthy parents.  Because they view the creative people as ‘cool’, they essentially start buying their way into the previously established first-wave hipster community. Before you know it, land value in the area increases massively, development pushes out most of the original people living there as well as all the mom-and-pop stores, leaving nothing but swathes of coffee shops that don’t actually sell coffee, only $7.50+ espressos, where people can sit while using their brand-new Apple products (whatever you do, DO NOT enter carrying a PC product unless you’re willing to risk being sneered to death.)

First-wave hipsters are generally great people, and fun to hang around with. The second-wave hipsters, on the other hand, are mostly self-involved assholes who consider themselves VERY cool due to the lifestyle they’ve bought their way into (and utterly destroyed by having done so.)

Exactly.  IME, the negative use of hipster by band playing friends who grew up in NYC…especially the working-class ones is exclusively referring to the second group….though their anger wasn’t derived so much from the level of creativity or lack thereof, but the pretentiousness, classist attitudes against them, and how their effects on gentrification have forced them out of their childhood neighborhoods in the NYC area (i.e. Lower East Side, East Village, etc). 

Can relate as I had to help a working-class high school classmate and his family move out of their lower-east side apartment after the landlords doubled down on kicking out rent-controlled low-income residents more than a decade ago in favor of wealthy NYU students and what my friends refer to as “hipsters” who can and are happy to pay the exorbitantly jacked up rents.

Drocket for the win on the Hipster thing.  100%.

“Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.”

This from JJG’s (at #45) link. He thinks it’s “going too far”. But this is actually my impression (although I don’t think I could put it so articulately). It’s an impression from a great distance, because I’ve been never been cool or hip, except for like 15 min. in 1992 when my slovenly dress and grooming at the time were suddenly labeled “grunge” by marketers. I’d love to know how it is wrong, if that’s what people think.

I’m appreciating 80s “new wave” and “modern rock” music now in a way I just couldn’t when I heard it in high school. Had I been able to get over that it was “for girls” (okay, in my teenage nice-guy mind: “those stupid snobby preppy girls with the asymmetrical hairdos and field-hockey skirts who won’t even look at me”), maybe I would have seen just how subversive it was, under the glammy surface.

Am I the only one who unapologetically loves keyboard rock or metal?  A lot of my favorite songs from traditional guitar and drum bands are those that incorporate keyboards (either electronic or piano), and I love bands like Nightwish that incorporate them extensively.  I can’t be the only one, really - a lot of those songs are also among the biggest hits for those bands.

The Chauffeur was probably my favorite Duran Duran song, hands-down.

We all have our lines of legitimacy, whether it’s guitars or the fact that you’re penning your own lyrics and hooks or whether or not you have a top 40 hit. It’s stupid, but I’ve always felt that there’s only so much you can criticize a group, no matter how pretty-boy they are, if they are genuinely writing their own stuff. Because corporate packaging is close to inescapable. After all, the Sex Pistols were just as corporately packaged as Duran Duran, and you have to be pretty well-versed in the punk scene to think of the Sex Pistols as sellouts. To everyone else, they were like, totally hardcore and shit.

Really, most of the hair bands from the 80s were indistinguishable from Duran Duran except for their audience. The idea that they were all serious rock-n-rollers completely ignores the fact that most of them had keyboardists, and they used just as much (if not more) hairspray and makeup as Duran Duran did.

‘Hipster’ is basically synonymous with ‘poser’, it’s just a catch-all term officially linking it with youth culture in general.

That’s how I parse the term also.  A “hipster” is a person trying too hard to be hip, but you can’t achieve hipness by trying to be something that you are not.

‘Hipster’ to me particularly denotes the jerk offs who move into a neighborhood because it’s cool and end up getting the rents jacked through the roof.  The neighborhood was cool because interesting and innovative people (who are not yet making money) lived there.  Of course, the interesting and innovative people lived there because it was affordable.  Then the hipsters move in, and the interesting people move out BECAUSE THEY CAN’T AFFORD IT ANYMORE.  The hipsters wonder why the neighborhood doesn’t seem as cool any more.  See East Village and Park Slope.  Coming soon to Bed-Stuy.

Oh, and Duran Duran made incredibly good pop music.  Good pop music is good music period.  Anyone who tells you different is not really into music.  Long live Duran Duran.

@ libdevil:  Nope, you’re not the only one who likes mixing keyboards and rock.  I like pure synthpop, pure guitar noise, and everything in between.  And a lot of great metal bands have incorporated synths into the most extreme guitar noise, like Leviathan and Xasthur, for example.

@ Might Ponygirl:  Re: punk.  It’s certainly both/and, but I always say that you can divide punk and post-punk bands into those that spring from either the Pistols or the Ramones because those groups define what punk “meant” throughout the following generations.  I know that’s a simplified picture, but I think it’s true on the most broad level.  The Pistol’s theatricality was pretty much fulfilled by the 80’s pop bands, regardless of the standard narrative that New Wave simply diluted the “pure” essence of the Clash/Pistols. 

I much preferred the Ramones.  Musically the Pistols were pretty boring to me—given the choice I’d rather listen to Flock of Seagulls than Nevermind the Bollocks; Lydon didn’t get interesting until Public Image Ltd.

Never heard of Xasthur or Leviathan before, so off I went to the Youtubes.  Loving the instrumentation in Xasthur’s stuff, but I’ve never been able to appreciate the screaming.  Turns me off every time I hear it.  Makes me want to tell the guy, “Hey, shut up, I’m trying to listen to the music.”  Which I admit kinda misses the point…  Much prefer a vocalist that either sings with or floats over the top of the instrumental component.  Lately I’ve been on a female vocalist kick in particular.

Interesting because where I was in New England, “new wave” and the people who followed it never got bashed. In fact the “cool kids” were all new wave.

Which was very curious, because most of the “new wave”-ers, were the shunned geeks who, before they found fashion and music, were called “faggots”.

It was a heady time for those of us who didn’t quite fit the mold but figured out the recipe.

Dr. Locrian, I think the visuals of the 80’s had much more to do with the glam rock of the early-mid 70’s than the Sex Pistols—think David Bowie, New York Dolls, Lou Reed, Roxy Music (who all came before the Pistols).

Also, as I noted above, the term New Wave was originally applied to both bands like the Talking Heads and the Ramones and the same was true with the term punk (and the two branches are about the same age). I’m not sure exactly when the split in terms came.

I never liked Duran Duran and they’re a good illustration of how to get me to hate a band (ok, I never hated them). Take some songs (they don’t even have to be songs I dislike) and then play them over and over again. And Duran Duran was played a LOT. This formula even works with with bands I like, such as Nirvana. By about 1992, I was sick of them and the whole ‘Seattle Sound’.

According to Babylon’s Burning, a rather large book both Amanda and I have read, “new wave” was a term McLaren was trying to use instead of punk to describe the classes of ‘76 and ‘77, as he saw punk as an outmoded American construct. It never worked, of course, and a whole mishmash of terms started applying to the early post-punk bands like Magazine, Gang of Four, etc.

In my endless digital music genre-twiddling, I’ve now assigned most guitar-driven UK material as “post-punk” and most alternative US stuff in the late 70s/early 80s (plus Ultravox-y UK stuff) as “new wave,” and have the two-tone people in a different category. My proto-punk category is not yet fully formed, and might begin with either the Shadows of Knight or The Monks and end with that mid-70s Cleveland stuff, if I can ever find a decent download.

norbizness: I clicked on your link. Did you know some German guy is trying to sell or lease your domain?

I’m domainless; I probably should amend my profile or something. For a while, the parker was calling me “Neue Internetprasenz,” which I used for the title of my abandoned early 2009 blog.

JohnL:  You have a point about the glam rock fashions, but I’m talking more about things got classified after the fact, like norbizness points out in #164.  Regardless of what McClaren may have said or intended, the Sex Pistols pretty much defined punk attitude and style, much more than any of the other bands did (which I think is totally unfair).  Aside from David Bowie and Roxy Music, I think you could argue that glam rock led more directly to KISS and the LA hair bands than what became New Wave—the synth pop bands were always lumped in more with the art rock/punk side than the glam rock side as I remember it. 

The NYC bands definitely muddy the waters somewhat.  Talking Heads and Blondie most definitely fell more into the New Wave category than punk (again, I’m talking more about retroactive genre labels, I know it was a lot more ambiguous when it was happening).  New York Dolls inspired a bunch of different rock strains, from metal to garage to punk and new wave.

I should add, part of why I’ve always interpreted that “new wave"ers didn’t get bashed, is, per his thesis, the popular girls (at least at my school) liked new wave.

One of the things that I discovered in High School was that from a “alpha wolf” perspective it didn’t actually matter who was tougher or whatever - it mattered who the popular girls liked. So, if the popular girls liked “new wave”, the jocks (who certainly weren’t new wave) weren’t going to say a damn thing. One withering look from the females that they so desperately wished to attain, and they permanently shut their gobs.

I say “popular”, but almost any female had similar powers regarding boys. Since a male’s entire motivation and ego was centered at his “little brain”, anything that might challenge its virility or hoped use was a crushing blow.

Teenage women (girls?) should understand this - the power really is in their hands if they know how to use it. Teenage boys will just about anything to gain the praise or avoid the ire from the girls, particularly the popular/pretty ones. I’m not saying this is the way it should be, just the way it is (or was) where I came from.

I’m kinda late to this party, but as an 80’s survivor, I want to point out in addition to what Amanda refers to in the OP, there was another angle to the New Wave disdain at the time.  Somewhere upthread a comment was made about “authenticity”.  I recall that this was definitely a big gripe against both punk and new wave in my suburban Detroit neighborhood.  Those bands weren’t authentic.  And authenticity wasn’t just defined as how they looked, but also had a lot to do with the group’s perceived skill or virtuosity.  “They can’t play their instruments,” was an all too common sneer.  There was often expressed a (mistaken) belief that it took no skill or talent to play a synthesizer.  I recall a number of albums that came out in the late 70’s and early 80’s, including Queen’s “News of the World” IIRC, had some kind of “no synthesizers” disclaimer in the liner notes.  Interestingly, this ties in rather neatly with what Delishka was talking about @78, although I think the instrument was not necessarily the deciding factor.  Emerson Lake and Palmer were highly regarded when I was in HS and they didn’t even have a guitar player.  But, what they did have was chops.

Now maybe the authenticity angle was just cover for the homophobia and sexism, but I really remember a tremendous amount of snobishness directed toward punk/new wave, and later hip hop that seemed to boil down to, “they didn’t spend enough time practicing in the basement so they couldn’t possibly be any good.”  This was the polar opposite to the attitude my friends and I had.  We heard The Ramones, et al, and thought, “Shit, we can do that!”

It’s interesting to note that what happened to Punk in the mid to late 70’s looks a lot like what happened to the Blues in the mid 60’s, although over a much shorter time frame.  A few bands, notably the Ramones, toured the UK and turned on a bunch of disaffected British kids, who then turned up the intensity and tossed out all the subtlety sold it back to the US as something “new”.  Folks will be arguing about which strain of Punk is the “real” one long after all the originators are dead and buried, but to me it’s pretty clear that it started in NY.

BTW, I’m betting that most of this group has already read it, but the book “Please Kill Me” is a great, first person account of the New York Punk scene of the 70’s.

I wonder if some of the anti-hipster animus is coming from those just a bit older, for whom thrift store clothing and living in certain areas of town was not a lifestyle choice but an artifact of poverty, and that barista job was a way to get through art school because mom and dad didn’t support that?

Also, I was 13 when I saw a picture of John Taylor, and I fell in love with his pretty, pretty face. So the music was not really what I was interested in (although he really can play the bass).

Yes, John Taylor is a great bassist.  Duran Duran had great bass lines - funky and danceable.  He couldn’t have done that without talent and skill.

Re: the gendering of instruments—the feminization of keyboard instruments resembles what happens in certain fields of the arts & humanities; e.g. the study of English literature tends to be construed as feminine, although top rank academics are mostly men.  With piano, it’s similar: lower level piano playing is associated with girls, female teachers, and a certain fussiness, discipline, and middle-class conformity that leaves it open to disdain—and yet in the higher echelons of composing and performance, men still dominate.

Also, the guitar has a lot more appeal in that you can sound like a Ramone within a few lessons; Rachmaninoff, not so much.

Ok, I have a friend, K who started a Socialist Party group in our city. At first it was just a small group of like-minded individuals working in the community to help make better conditions for workers (they helped people get legal help if they’d been wrongfully terminated, etc.), protesting certain local government actions, running for office, and they had a community garden in a lower income area.

After a while the hipsters heard about the group, and since it’s “cool” to be a socialist, they started showing up. Attendance at the group has quadrupled, but the actual work of the group is way way down. Everyone wants shirts and stickers, and beer nights. No one wants to work in the garden. No one wants to show up to city council meetings to discuss ways to improve the city. No one wants to run for office. No one wants to go into the “bad” part of town to look for people who need social justice. Its just a social club. So, K is quitting the group he started, and chartered, because he feels he can find a better place to spend his time.

I’ve seen a similar pattern happen to groups all over the city. The original GLBT group quit helping kids who’d been kicked out by their parents for coming out; now they have parties and parades. There’s a new group (made up of the old group’s original members) who does the hard work now. And on and on. It isn’t an age divide either. So, among my group of friends there is a lot of disdain for hipsters, not for what they wear (we look quite similar) but for the shallowness of what they do. They are hanger’s on, they are posers. And they displace and destroy the hard work of people who are genuinely interested in doing something. Its frustrating.

I admit, I do roll my eyes at groups of people walking around all wearing the Official Hipster Uniform: skinny jeans (both guys and girls in these groups are always very thin), vintage t-shirts, thick-rimmed glasses, facial hair on guys that doesn’t suit them. (That mustache isn’t cool and ironic; it just looks like some kind of small furry animal died on your face.)

But that’s as far as my “hipster-hating” goes. And it’s not unique to hipsters. I kind of roll my eyes at any group that seems to have a particular required fashion.

living in certain areas of town was not a lifestyle choice but an artifact of poverty,

Yah think?

Since the 16th century, the French word bohémien was used to refer to gypsies, based on the erroneous belief that they come from Bohemia.[5]  As gypsies are associated in the common imagination with a wild and free life separate from rigid society, the name came to be associated with the counter-culture of young artists and other rebels in the Latin Quarter of 19th century Paris. This was a common colloquial term in Paris, when Henri Murger used it in the title of the stories which eventually became the basis for the opera. The fame of Murger’s stories carried the term to the world beyond Paris and into other languages, such as English, where “bohemian” has a similar connotation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_bohème

I’ve also read that the Gypsies lived there because the rent in that Quarter was cheap, so that would make sense as well.

I cannot wait to see the reactions of those who ask now that I’ve picked up the electric guitar.

No, you don’t.

First, you want to tell them that you’ve been listening to this, performed by Christopher O’Riley.

Then you tell them about playing the electric guitar.

Also, the guitar has a lot more appeal in that you can sound like a Ramone within a few lessons; Rachmaninoff, not so much.

There used to be arrangements made of harder pieces for the beginning student to play, some of my first pieces I learned to play were of that nature.

But yes, from what I understand the 1-4-5 chord sequence is pretty easy for beginners to pick up on the guitar, and that’s one of the harmonic building blocks of Western music, popular and classical.

Also, a guitar is pretty cheap compared to a keyboard instrument, and you aren’t stuck inside a room if you want to practice it or play it for someone.

I think a lot of animus likely comes from younger people too. To the millennials likely view them as the stereotypical ambitionless gen Xer. “Get a job” and “grow up” are among the favorite insults of the sub 25 yr old.

After a while the hipsters heard about the group, and since it’s “cool” to be a socialist, they started showing up. Attendance at the group has quadrupled, but the actual work of the group is way way down.

Hardly limited to music or culture.  Just about every long-term volunteer firefighter can tell you about all the people who show up to join after there’s been a spectacular incident or fire, but very quickly are nowhere to be found when the drudge work of cleaning and inspecting hoses, servicing the vehicles, or cleaning the fire hall has to be done.

Amanda @118:

Outside of hipsters using “hipster” as a term to bash other hipsters they don’t think are the exact right kind of hip…

From the responses you’ve had on this thread, I’d say the image that comes to mind for most people when someone says the word “hipster” is that very person doing the bashing on others because they’re not the “exact right kind of hip”, and not, as you state at the top, “for having a playful approach to fashion and a tendency to do things for the hell of it instead of for some supposedly greater, unnamed purpose.”

Personally, I tend not to think of playful people like that as “hipsters”, but as “full human beings”.

Dug this up, too:

Harper’s article from the inventor of flashmobs

I’m a cranky old square. Hipsters, from what I’ve seen, despise my very life. When I think of going out to dinner someplace nice, I think Olive Garden, Coulton’s or Outback. This very space has derided these as mass-produced, inauthentic and dreadful. My music is nonthreatening and my clothes are frumpy. I’m not boycotting the right things or places, and I’m raising a large family on minimal pay. I AM that ambitionless GenXer…who works two jobs.

I’m too old to “get” hipsters. I was too old to get grunge. I was too country for new-wave. I’m too country still for what passes for country these days.

Duran Duran? That I like. It’s never much later than 1989, musically speaking, in the cab of my truck, whether I’m listening to rock or country.

Someone above mentioned the “waves” of hipsters in a neighborhood. I think that part of the animus towards hipsters might be that they play a definite part in the gentrification process. When I was living in DC I found that an “up and coming” neighborhood meant that the hipsters were in the process of chasing out the African American population. Someone above also mentioned living in little odessa in NYC and hoping that it wasn’t “discovered.” It isn’t really the hipster’s fault per se, but hipsters are a harbinger of neighborhood change.

John @177

I am in the under 25 demo and I have always thought of hipsters as being more of a millennial phenomenon.

I thought “grunge” was funny because pretty much all the males on my mother’s side had worn that “uniform” all my life as their everyday working wear.

@#177: Gen-x is way too old now - I think you got your generations a bit mixed up!

Gen-x is mostly the “birth dearth”, which is largely well over 35 now.  Most hipsters are in their 20s, save for a few headed-for-a-hair-weave mid-life crisis types.

Hipsters tend to be young, but there have been hipsters since the dawn of mass culture which means there are hipsters (or ex-hipsters) in each age group. The term hipster is not well-defined which is why there’s an argument here. There are two types of groups that have been called hipsters: people who search for their art outside of the mainstream; people who jump on the latest thing. Obviously there is some overlap between the two groups, but there is a distinct difference between them.

Ms Kate, the grunge thing is part of a funny thing that tends to happen. In both grunge and punk, the idea was that what you wore didn’t matter. It was the music and attitude instead. The funny thing is that fairly quickly a uniform developed. Kurt Cobain wore he always wore on stage and then fans copied him—which completely missed the point. And this example shows the difference between the two types of hipsters—the first type would have understood Cobain’s point in dress and would wear whatever they usually wore to the concerts; the second type would have copied Cobain’s dress.

Somebody mentioned hipsterdom being the first subculture created under the microscope of the advertising industry. Maybe in America, but I’d argue that otakudom, defined as manga/anime/Japanese videogame fandom, is older than hipsterdom and definitely a creature of the advertising industry. Its one of the most commercialized subcultures out there. Western fandom can be pretty commericialized to but less so than Japanese otakudom because of demographic/geographic issues.

After a while the hipsters heard about the group, and since it’s “cool” to be a socialist, they started showing up. Attendance at the group has quadrupled, but the actual work of the group is way way down.

I’ve had that experience many time. I was happy when I joined NEFAC (back when it was still NEFAC) that they had an actual selection process. You had to read some documents and demonstrate to the selection committee that you understood them on a theoretical level and that you agreed with them (one of the big points most anarchists balk on was ‘collective responsibility’, i.e. anytime we agree to do something as a group then any failure is the responsability of the whole group, not a given individual). Otherwise they’d point you to the zillion of anarchist groups that are synthesists and thus are big tents that accept anyone. Like they said, “It’s better off for both you and us if you join these guys instead. After a couple months you’ll just start resenting our group because we don’t fit your philosophy and we’re not going to change how we do things just for you”.

Needless to say, NEFAC was not popular with the so-called ‘kiddies’, as some here call them. We were often called ‘crypto-Leninists’.

This example shows the difference between the two types of hipsters—the first type would have understood Cobain’s point in dress and would wear whatever they usually wore to the concerts; the second type would have copied Cobain’s dress.

Come as you are, as you were, as you want me to be, as a friend as a trend ...

@ JohnL:  as a local eyewitness who saw Seattle go from being a foggy backwater city to a temporary national obsession, I agree.  Basically you wore thrift store 70’s clothes because they were funny or just cheap, and threw a flannel on because it was fucking cold at night.  Thrown in punk boots and a leather jacket for rock flavor I’d be lying if I claimed that there wasn’t a self conscious cultivation of a certain look, or anti-look, though.  And it was around this time that I noticed boutique-ish used clothing stores like Retro Viva gathering the most sought after goodwill stuff and selling them for higher prices. 

Of course we never actually called a lot of the local bands ‘grunge’—that was a term originally only used to describe the sound of bands like Green River/Mudhoney and a few others, not the scene as a whole.  Nirvana only made one album in that style.  But it was always an annoying label:  were the Fastbacks or Young Fresh Fellows or Pure Joy grunge? 

I often wonder exactly what it was that made Seattle and Nirvana the spearhead that opened the gates of mainstream culture to ‘alternative.’  After all, there were countless other cities with great bands all doing their own thing, and thrift store fashion, while always popular among the various proto-hipster subcultures, was really hitting its stride all over the place IIRC.  Those were the days when you could find an Esquivel LP at a garage sale for 2$.  Sigh.

I often wonder exactly what it was that made Seattle and Nirvana the spearhead that opened the gates of mainstream culture to ‘alternative.’

Queensryche.

So there’s the defending of hipsters and the misinterpretation of a Dire Straits song all in the same post.

All right then.

my abandoned early 2009 blog.

norb (I hope I can call him norb) needs a blog partner or six—I sense maintaining a blog became burdensome.

Basically you wore thrift store 70’s clothes because they were funny or just cheap, and threw a flannel on because it was fucking cold at night.  Thrown in punk boots and a leather jacket for rock flavor I’d be lying if I claimed that there wasn’t a self conscious cultivation of a certain look, or anti-look, though.

It was also the standard northwest working man outfit.  My uncles and cousins worked mostly in forestry and trucking.  All those guys wore jeans and a t-shirt, with a flannel for morning warmth or to ward off a chilly fog in the coast range, and heavy work boots.  Sunny break while working hard?  Tie the flannel around your waist.

My mom’s cousins used to pass their worn Levi’s down to me - too worn to still protect their legs, but perfectly battle scarred!  I took a picture of a fashionable boutique with a “grunge fashion” window set up and sent it to my goofy great uncle, a retired millright. “Hey Lois!  Look! I’m suave and cooo-too ree ay!”

Along the lines of that party, I have found wearing a pastel polo and top-siders to a hipster coffee shop is the best way to get a thousand hipster death stares of judgment.

Had the same effect when I came to a few friends’ performances straight from a formal dress day at work where I had to wear a suit, tie, and formal pants/shoes. 

A band member friend elicited similar reactions when he had the temerity to bring an Explorer type of electric guitar and play it on stage. 

To many of the indie rock hipsters at that venue, that guitar was indicative of overcommercialized ‘80s hardrock/heavy metal.  Then again, it really seems ironic how they also love to condemn friends who play stratocaster type guitars as being “too commonplace” and “conformist” when so many of them use mid-high-end Fender Telecasters to such an extent that it has become the ubiquitous “indie rock guitar” to many in the NYC/Boston areas.  More interestingly…I never hear similar comments about indie players using the Gibson Les Paul, ES-335, or SG even though they are all very commonplace in the modern guitar music world.

@133oldeminist,

Huh, I didn’t noticed I left that out.  I totally agree with what you said, I just didn’t specify it.

I think a lot of animus likely comes from younger people too. To the millennials likely view them as the stereotypical ambitionless gen Xer. “Get a job” and “grow up” are among the favorite insults of the sub 25 yr old.

I’m more in agreement with alysia and those who disagree.

The hipsters being criticized and disdained by friends tend to be overwhelmingly millenials in their 20s with the oldest cohorts being in their extreme early 30s. 

Hipsters as the term is used by those friends and many others did not really exist as a cultural/economic force recognized in the ways they are today until a few years into the new millenium at least. 

Though this may be due to my being in the extreme tail end of Gen X….I didn’t really start hearing the term “hipster” being bandied about so often among friends and the MSM in negative or neutral contexts until around 2005. 

Moreover, from my own personal observations/interactions with the hipsters during friends’ band performances and walking around the Village, Lower East Side, and Dumbo on occasion, the idea of Gen Xers being considered and accepted as one of them is quite laughable considering the strong ageist attitudes I’ve seen and overheard towards Gen X and older groups being freely bantered in my presence because I’m often mistaken as an early-mid 20something.  The reactions when I question/call them out on their ageist attitudes are something to behold!

Another critical reason why in more generationally diverse bars/venues or those heavily populated by those in their mid-30s and older, the anti-hipster animus is particularly strong, especially among those born/raised in NYC and those who are working class/came from working-class backgrounds….including many who have been longtime artists/musicians.

So…appropriating the oppression of gay people in order to take a swipe at those who for some reason think poorly of smug, shallow, gentrifying bastards.

How like a fuckin’ hipster.

My brother is a ‘grandpa hipster’ i.e. 31. Why is he a hipster? He moved into a hip neighborhood in NY, loves irony, and is the sort of person who listens to records on those record players that hook up to your computer. *I always thought he was Gen X though. What is Gen X? I’m Gen Y/a millennial at 26

I always thought that the X/Y divide was somewhere around the mid to late 30’s:  anyone who came of age in the 80’s to the early-mid 90’s.  I’d be hard pressed to name the exact cultural differences, though, between the modern hipsters and the hipsters of previous generations, aside from the obvious technological advances.  Which is why exholt’s comment at #198 surprises me a bit, re: the hostility to Gen X.  Aren’t they raiding the 80’s and 90’s for their own retro flair?

Then again Gen X hated on Baby Boomers, and there was a lot of looting in the 60’s closet for cultural compost.

To clarify, though, one of hallmarks of Gen X was the reclamation of ‘70’s detritus from the cultural dumpster.  Retro nostalgia runs on a pretty reliable 20 year fermentation cycle, so of course the 80’s came back with a vengeance in the Oughts.

Henry Holland @195, I KNEW someone was going to call me on that!  Of course it’s true that Greg Lake also played guitar, but IIRC it was strictly (or mostly, don’t want to get stung twice) acoustic and isn’t that really just as poofy as keyboards? /snark.

Maybe the area I grew up in was somehow unique, but it definitely wasn’t the songwriting.  Most kids probably couldn’t have named an ELP song other than “Lucky Man” or “Karn Evil 9”.  What they did know, however, was that ELP “could play their instruments”.

Maybe the area I grew up in was somehow unique, but it definitely wasn’t the songwriting.  Most kids probably couldn’t have named an ELP song other than “Lucky Man” or “Karn Evil 9”.  What they did know, however, was that ELP “could play their instruments”.
Comment #203: Bill in OH on 09/22 at 11:03 AM

Even hanging upside down.

“Poofy” instruments are saved from poofiness by technique.  Like the “Ukulele Weeps” youtube video with over six million hits.

Not only do I not understand why hipster bashing is going up, I can barely discern who the heck “hipsters” are! As far as I can tell, “hipster” can be applied to anyone who is young and has a fashion sense. If I’m right about that, then yes it is disturbing that it’s suddenly become popular to bash it.

Nope, atheist, the hipster aesthetic may be getting a little mainstream and mingling some with general fashionableness, but it’s a pretty recognizable style.

Though this may be due to my being in the extreme tail end of Gen X….I didn’t really start hearing the term “hipster” being bandied about so often among friends and the MSM in negative or neutral contexts until around 2005.

The Hipster Handbook came out in 2003, and I waited in line overnight for tickets to see The Seagull in Central Park with a trio of hipsters from Williamsburg (though I didn’t know the phrase at the time).  That would put the earliest hipsters as being born in the ‘70s, so there’s definitely a Gen X element to hipsterdom.  If I recall, The Hipster Handbook even namechecked places in Wicker Park that I used to go to in the ‘90s.  Generally, the Gen X “slacker” vibe carries on very strongly into hipsterdom.

Also there was the “Grunge Speak” hoax from way back in 1992, which fits right in with the hipster desire to be inscrutable.

One other thing:  I get that people living on the cheap buy cheap beer (I’ve had plenty of Schlitz and Tecate in my time), but I can’t help but think that the choice of PBR is simply because of Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet.  If so, -1,000,000.

atheist @205:  See comments 1-204.

People wearing hip hop style clothing are not considered ‘hipsters’ despite being young and having fashion sense.

@Comment #207: NY Expat on 09/22 at 01:17 PM

atheist @205:  See comments 1-204.

I did and honestly, I still don’t really get it. Mabe this is just me not having a clue.

Atheist, its like pornography

My brother is a ‘grandpa hipster’ i.e. 31. Why is he a hipster? He moved into a hip neighborhood in NY, loves irony, and is the sort of person who listens to records on those record players that hook up to your computer. *I always thought he was Gen X though. What is Gen X? I’m Gen Y/a millennial at 26

I recalled that Gen X birth years were from 1965-late 1970’s.  Your brother at 31 is right on the dividing line between tail end Gen X and the beginning of the Gen Y/millenials.  Depending on the source you are referencing…he could be a Gen Xer or an old millenial. 

Which is why exholt’s comment at #198 surprises me a bit, re: the hostility to Gen X.

I wouldn’t go so far as hostility as much as disdainfully seeing them as “has beens” and “over the hill” in their world of ” being cool”.  Any hostility from them was mainly from my calling out/questioning their ageist assumptions with them feeling put out, wrongfully accused, and feeling that an interloper was in their midst (me as a Gen Xer once they realized my actual age).

Honestly exholt, I don’t understand why you’re always hatin’ on the rich, young, pretty, whatever.  I understand that “they” “gave you” a hard time during your undergrad, but whatever!  You are now older, in a stable job I assume you like.  Why keep the resentment alive?  Surely you know that to someone out there, you are the rich, privileged kid that they pour all their hate, envy and resentment into.

In other news, landlords in the NYU area have to take advantage of the affluent students wanting to rent from them, just like landlords here could raise the rent if the neighborhood became hip.  What is a shame is the kind and intensity of commerce that follows these kids around.  American Apparel, fast food joints, mega-grocery stores, those can really bum people out and break up the neighborhood personality. 

And if young kids make fun of your work clothes, why do you care so much?  Why would you go out of your way to hang out where younger kids hang?  Why would you “interlope”, or call them out on their ageism?  And why call it “ageism” when it is simply 21 year olds not wanting to hang out with 29 year olds?  Do you think that 21 year olds’ opinions and prejudices on who to hang with will affect your life at all?  Or does it bother you that you were never part of an ‘in’ crowd to begin with, so hipsters are just another ‘in’ crowd to antagonize?

I think maybe people my age are willing to bash the “hipsters” because a whole new generation of talented young artists comes into town and starts changing the aesthetics, while most of us have just started getting a foot in the door of the worlds of writing, music, arts, dance, entertainment, etc.  Here comes another great showing by a 19 year-old from Tokyo, an amazing CD release from a 20 year-old songwriter, another brilliant 22 year-old interning in your company, kicking your ass, changing the game. 

We are always ready to excuse our shortcoming by saying the other kids have more money, mommy and daddy pay their rents, they have more time to practice, they can afford to look cute, to be well rested, they do a lot of coke, whatever.  We don’t like to stop and think that maybe they are just smarter, more talented, cuter, plain better than us.

We don’t like to stop and think that maybe they are just smarter, more talented

And are actually…reallyreallynice?

Hahaha!  Bruto is just as popular as Ceasar, Bruto is just as cute as Ceasar, we should totally stab Ceasar!!!!

No, but seriously.  I had a horrible experience being poor and female during my mostly rich-mostly male undergrad, and hated everyone.  Then one day I figured out that the kid I envied and hated the most was actually nice and humble, not that rich (although significantly better off than me), and realized that it wasn’t his fault if he was just more talented than me.  And better off.  And cuter.  And nicer. 

Not to say all hipsters are reallyreally nice, but demanding that landlords don’t cater to people who can afford higher rents or that 21 year olds be friendly to you or that new fashions fit adult bodies instead of the super skinny bodies of teenagers says more about our own sense of entitlement than about hipsterism.  And when people call hipsters undeserving for supposedly being rich, it makes me want to call them on being sore losers.

And if young kids make fun of your work clothes, why do you care so much?  Why would you go out of your way to hang out where younger kids hang?  Why would you “interlope”, or call them out on their ageism?  And why call it “ageism” when it is simply 21 year olds not wanting to hang out with 29 year olds?  Do you think that 21 year olds’ opinions and prejudices on who to hang with will affect your life at all?  Or does it bother you that you were never part of an ‘in’ crowd to begin with, so hipsters are just another ‘in’ crowd to antagonize?

Because it seems I was under the mistaken belief that I had the right to go to whatever venues my band friends happen to be playing in because I liked their music.  Incidentally, most of the hatred you and other commenters are ascribing to me are actually those of my friends playing in various bands who put up with the “hipsters” in their parlance because that’s what they considered an “occupational hazard” of their vocation. 

And a mistaken belief that part of going to such venues is meeting new people to see what they’re thinking, possibly making new friends, and giving them the benefit of the doubt that they’re reasonable open-minded people who aren’t going to be assholes of any stripe until they prove otherwise. 

I think maybe people my age are willing to bash the “hipsters” because a whole new generation of talented young artists comes into town and starts changing the aesthetics, while most of us have just started getting a foot in the door of the worlds of writing, music, arts, dance, entertainment, etc.  Here comes another great showing by a 19 year-old from Tokyo, an amazing CD release from a 20 year-old songwriter, another brilliant 22 year-old interning in your company, kicking your ass, changing the game.

The hipsters that my band playing friends and now I are annoyed with are almost always conspicuous consumers and/or working in peripheral areas of the art/music world who loved to be pretentiously dismissive of others’ differing tastes and display strong classist attitudes. 

The latter tends to especially not go well with those of us who grew up in working-class backgrounds and were hoping that high school/college was the last time we’d meet such a large concentration of people exhibiting such attitudes.  At least in my circle of friends…especially the band-playing friends…the hipsters’ degree of creativity or lack thereof rarely came into the picture…..unless the hipsters concerned do make it an issue by doing things such as making rude remarks about a friend’s instrument because it “symbolized the excesses of 80’s commercial rock” or “Oh, you’re using an [off-branded/lower-end] instrument rather than a REAL [famous brand name] instrument”. 

I found both to be quite ironic considering how nearly all real top-flight musicians/artists whether at my undergrad campus or various venues in NYC IME tend to be far more open-minded and respectful of people having different musical and artistic tastes than the non-musician/artist fanbase at large. 

Moreover, those who especially snob about someone not playing a famous brand name instrument tends to be those who are justifiably insecure about their playing abilities on some level and/or have been completely taken in by the commercialized hype about them…..especially when the best musicians IME tend to have the chops to make even the lower-end brands and/or crappiest instruments work well for them in their live performances.

Bill, Bill, Bill.  Greg was/is an accomplished electric player. He was rated alongside Robert Fripp in the area of England they grew up with and in all of his pre-King Crimson bands played guitar.  He played electric guitar on all of ELP’s studio albums, most effectively on BSS; he was also an early adapter to the guitar synth.

Hey, I learned something today!  Thanks, Henry.  I always thought of him as a bass player first and foremost.  Probably because I was always a bigger Crimson fan than ELP, or maybe because I’m a bass player.  Or I can’t read liner notes.  Maybe all of the above.  Now I have to go track down those old records.

I guess the whole topic (I really just picked ELP at random as an example. It could have been Yes or Rush just as easily) has just always fascinated me.  As someone with broad musical taste, I always seem to find myself having that discussion in which someone assures me that some genre I like (used to be punk, then electronic music. Now it tends to be hip hop) isn’t real music because they can’t play their instruments/have a computer play it/sample other people’s music, etc.  The technical skill involved always seems to be the overriding element.  I see that going hand in hand with “they’re lightweights”, they look like fags” and “women like them”.  It’s just another way of devaluing a band based on some arbitrary standard.  And, let’s face it, there’s definitely a dick-swinging element to being a guitar badass like Jimmy Page, or a keyboard badass like Keith Emerson.  At least for a certain cross section of the fan base, if not for the musicians themselves.

I think I’ve probably beat this topic into the ground sufficiently. Thanks for the lesson (really)!

The technical skill involved always seems to be the overriding element.  I see that going hand in hand with “they’re lightweights”, they look like fags” and “women like them”.  It’s just another way of devaluing a band based on some arbitrary standard.  And, let’s face it, there’s definitely a dick-swinging element to being a guitar badass like Jimmy Page, or a keyboard badass like Keith Emerson.  At least for a certain cross section of the fan base, if not for the musicians themselves.

Interesting considering I met many older self-proclaimed punk fans who loved punk precisely because they regarded lack of technical skill to be a virtue.  Nearly all of them hated ELP, Yes, and other prog-rock groups because they felt the long guitar solos(“guitar wanking”) and technically complex arrangements were signs rock was being infected with overly-pretentious rockers who were looking to emulate classical music virtuosos and thus, kill what made rock music great.

The whole battle seems to be about what makes something “authentic.” 

For some it’s having monster chops, for some it’s having “heart,” for some it’s having the right look, for some it’s having the biggest or best or “right” equipment.  There are those who think sampling and programming and mixing is not a skill; others who think classical musicians are just blindly following notes on a page, piano typists taking dictation from some guy from 400 years ago.

And…the whole battling over authenticity is frankly boring to me.  I like all kinds of music, from the earnest but clunky to the sublimely technical.  The more open you are to different kinds of music, the more joy you can find in life.  Why cut yourself off?

“Because it seems I was under the mistaken belief that I had the right to go to whatever venues my band friends happen to be playing in because I liked their music.”

You have a right to go wherever you want, but you don’t have the right to be liked anywhere you go.  You are going places where 21 y/os hang, who (hipster or not) think 30 is old and over the hill, complaining because they don’t like you, and then interpreting their dislike of you as ageism.

“The hipsters that my band playing friends and now I are annoyed with are almost always conspicuous consumers and/or working in peripheral areas of the art/music world who loved to be pretentiously dismissive of others’ differing tastes and display strong classist attitudes.”

Personally, I love it when conspicuous-consumers come to my shows.  Specially the ones with jobs in peripheral areas of the art/music world.  They appreciate art but have money to buy CDs and a ton of drinks, later go to the website and buy more merch, get interested in the band, and generally act very enthusiastically about what they like.  I have seen the kids you are talking about too, they are just being normal teenagers/young people.  Everybody dismisses other people’s differing tastes.  It work’s in your favor when you are what they like.  I don’t know what you mean by “dismissing pretentiously”.  How are you suppose to dismiss?  And I would love for you to tell me an example of the classist attitudes. 

Also, the whole instrument brand dynamic you are describing has always been common between not just musicians but people of all professions that use tools, of all ages, of all cultures, of all countries, and has nothing to do with hipsters.

“You are going places where 21 y/os hang, who (hipster or not) think 30 is old and over the hill, complaining because they don’t like you, and then interpreting their dislike of you as ageism.”

I agree with a lot of your points (yes, no one’s obligated to like anyone), but to be pedantic about it:  isn’t believing people are over the hill by 30, by its very definition, ageist?  It goes both ways, to be sure.  Saying “get off my lawn you meddling kids” is just as bad.

You are going places where 21 y/os hang, who (hipster or not) think 30 is old and over the hill, complaining because they don’t like you, and then interpreting their dislike of you as ageism.
Comment #221: raspberryjamba on 09/23 at 10:56 AM

How is this different from ageism?  They don’t like someone because she’s over a certain age.  Sounds pretty clear to me.

Exholt, yes, it’s annoying when you want to see a band that is loved by a lot of young people, and some of them are assy about being younger than you and therefore believe they are better.  That would be why you’d concentrate on the music and not the audience members. 

Most of the time you can just choose not to interact with someone who says something you think is silly, pretentious, or even immature.  Someone says something about you being or looking old, wearing funny looking clothes?  Use the advice you got from your mom or dad when you were a kid and just ignore it. 

Someone starts expounding to her/his friends about the band’s choice of instruments, technique, style?  The age old who’s better, this group or some other group?  If you engage them on their cherished beliefs, be prepared to waste a lot of time arguing instead of listening to the music. 

If you don’t have a choice, that does indeed suck.  I haven’t had that happen to me, but I am sure it does sometimes.  That band’s loss, I’d say, because I’d want to leave.

You have a right to go wherever you want, but you don’t have the right to be liked anywhere you go.  You are going places where 21 y/os hang, who (hipster or not) think 30 is old and over the hill, complaining because they don’t like you, and then interpreting their dislike of you as ageism.

Actually, their ageist attitudes weren’t directed at me at first as they assumed I was their age because people tend to mistake me for a 20-something.  I was annoyed because of their ageist assumptions that only 20somethings had the right to come and enjoy live music at the venues where my friends played and that anyone who was late 20s and up should stay out and “do what old people do”.  Don’t know about you, but that attitude is wrong and should be called out whenever it is exhibited.  Would you accept that they had a right to say that about anyone who was of the wrong race, gender, and/or sexual orientation??

What’s more ironic is that the bands my friends play in have a great diversity in age groups…ranging from early 20s for the youngest member to older members in their mid-late 40s….and they felt the attitudes displayed by those hipsters was 100% complete BS.  Fortunate that they weren’t the majority of the audience….though they were the most annoying to both the non-hipsters and the band members. 

As for classist attitudes….gave you a great example with some hipsters making snide comments about bandmembers playing lower-end brand instruments like guitars whose retail value is less than $150 by implying that they did so because they were “too cheap” to get the “better” brand name instrument.  In so doing, they were ignoring the fact that some of the band friends do not have several hundred dollars or more laying around for a brand-name guitar, bass, keyboards, and drums or the fact some were using the lower-end brand instruments to make an artistic statement satirizing the massive conspicuous consumption and obsession over “brand names”. 

Another great example was implying some bandmates who never attended college or attended state universities did so because they “weren’t smart enough”* to get into college/“topflight” fancy private colleges like NYU….and not thinking that it was due to lack of finances or that it may not be the best choice for us.  From the ones who attended NYU, it was especially ironic considering my high school classmates and I regarded it as a safety school for rich kids back in the mid-‘90s….especially considering the extreme stinginess of their financial aid office as we found from our firsthand experiences…

* Really meant “rich enough” through having loaded parents/trust-funds to defray the exorbitant tuition/expenses of attending.

OK, I guess I’m not done derailing the thread yet.

Interesting considering I met many older self-proclaimed punk fans who loved punk precisely because they regarded lack of technical skill to be a virtue.  Nearly all of them hated ELP, Yes, and other prog-rock groups because they felt the long guitar solos(“guitar wanking”) and technically complex arrangements were signs rock was being infected with overly-pretentious rockers who were looking to emulate classical music virtuosos and thus, kill what made rock music great.

Yep, I ran into those folks too, but they weren’t nearly as numerous as the technique fans. At least not in the time/place of my teens and 20’s, and especially not now.  And I’ve seen the tendency to worship technical skill continue through the original punk movement, the Seattle scene of the 90’s, neo garage rock, and pretty much any genre that emphasized heart and passion over skill. I still hear it to this day in relation to rap and hip hop.

And…the whole battling over authenticity is frankly boring to me.  I like all kinds of music, from the earnest but clunky to the sublimely technical.  The more open you are to different kinds of music, the more joy you can find in life.  Why cut yourself off?

To use a worn out cliche: This.  I couldn’t agree more.

@222 Dr. Locrian:
I always thought ageism was when companies fired their older employees because retirement was going to come soon, or when health insurance companies charge you more because you are older.  Kids who are 21 have very unrealistic expectations, especially “top flight” kids who think that because they were a star in high school, they’ll be rich and famous (or whatever the goal is) by the time they are 30.  Therefore they might see anyone who’s that old and not rich and famous as a loser.

I think that, in that sense, it is not “ageism”.  They will idolize their mentors and heros who are in their thirties and forties.  And if the bouncer is not checking your ID when you come in and cutting you off at a certain old age marker, then it isn’t ageism.  You can hang out where you like, and have no right to call kids who don’t like you ageist.  It is possible that they just don’t like you.  Reminds me of this asshole guy who said I was racist cause I wouldn’t date him.

“I was annoyed because of their ageist assumptions that only 20somethings had the right to come and enjoy live music at the venues where my friends played and that anyone who was late 20s and up should stay out and “do what old people do”.  Don’t know about you, but that attitude is wrong and should be called out whenever it is exhibited.”

I find this attitude comical, being that young kids do not have the means to keep spending adults out of public spaces.  It would be ageist if it was enforced (like racism and sexism have been in the past).  I think it is a little trivializing to compare apartheid and oppression to your impression of some kids who don’t like “grown-ups” in their midst.

“As for classist attitudes….gave you a great example with some hipsters making snide comments about bandmembers playing lower-end brand instruments like guitars whose retail value is less than $150 by implying that they did so because they were “too cheap” to get the “better” brand name instrument.”

This happens since I can remember.  Every kid compares toys , and every grown-up compares tools.  Not saying it is good, just saying it is not exclusive to “hipsters”.  And in fact, the hipsters I now like to make it a point of not getting the name brands.  It’s passé.

ou can hang out where you like, and have no right to call kids who don’t like you ageist.  It is possible that they just don’t like you.  Reminds me of this asshole guy who said I was racist cause I wouldn’t date him.
Comment #226: raspberryjamba on 09/23 at 02:12 PM

You explicitly were speaking about people who don’t like people over 30.  Not people who don’t like exholt and it happens she’s over 30.

And you don’t wait until someone doesn’t hire you for being female to call him a sexist.  Calling you honey and ignoring what you have to say because you’re female is enough.

No one here is saying it’s the same as apartheid or Hitler HITLER HITLERRRRR1111!!11!!1 Jebus.

scathew, #168:

Right, it’s the “females” (ugh) who have all the power socially. That must be why so many teenage girls are insecure about their bodies and so many are victims of rape.

Teenage boys will just about anything to gain the praise or avoid the ire from the girls, particularly the popular/pretty ones.

And if the girls are fat, “ugly,” or otherwise “uncool,” they’re targets of mockery or just invisible.

Can’t believe we’re seeing this Nice Guy™ horseshit on a feminist blog, but then again, we get to see plenty of fat hatred and classism here, too….

I’m a little late to this…but I just wanted to add my two cents. I think the so called hipster bashing has nothing to do with homophobia (at least from the people that I have heard from) and mostly to do with class and socioeconomic issues. People here have mentioned the classist overtones coming from many hipsters in that, however I’m surprised that no one has mentioned race…the fact that if you go to Williamsburg, you will notice that the vast majority of these hipster folk are white - this is not just a coincidence. Anyone who knows the history of oppressed peoples has to know that classism and racism intersect (as well as gender). Consider you are from a working class / poor family.  Your neighborhood also has many immigrants and working class people like you, the rents are affordable and thank goodness you and your neighbors also get some help from food stamps and a local thrift store, although there have been days where you have had to make do with noodle soup since $270 in food stamps usually does not last the whole month. Lately you have been noticing a lot of your neighbors moving away because of rising rents. You notice a new coffee shop open down the street with a lot of young white clientele sitting in the windows staring at their brightly colored Apple computers. You check it out but discover that you can’t get a cup of coffee for under $2.50. You continue getting your coffee at the small bodega at the corner for 50cents. However, soon even the bodega raises it’s prices and a coffee there now costs $1.50. One day after work you come home to find a letter from your landlord informing you that your rent will be increasing beyond what you can afford…you are sad to leave however you can no longer afford to stay. But this is only the beginning…pretty soon the neighborhood will be unrecognizable, the mom & pop stores, the local flavor and the culture of the neighborhood will be whitewashed and replaced by American Apparels and pretentious coffee shops…it’s been happening all over Brooklyn (where I live) and all throughout NYC.

Now if you really think about what it’s like to be poor, non-white, or perhaps (like me) you are ill/disabled and living on gov’t disability payments, you have none of the socioeconomic advantages that the privileged class has (i.e. the wealthy, abled, white, male, etc)....and then you think of the lifestyle of say a hipster living near NYU or in Williamsburg, and you consider the commonalities of these people such as, expensive 4 year college degrees, expensive loft apartments or condos that are not even close to affordable on the hipster’s part-time job as a barrista (hence, many have trust funds or are receiving financial assistance from parents), other costly items such as expensive guitars/instruments, sound systems, vespas, vintage clothing, record collections, $300-week pot habits, etc. Then there’s the “ironic” fashion sense, where coupled with all this expensive material wealth, these kids are also shopping at thrift stores, eating noodle soup, hand rolling cigarettes, picking furniture and other things off the street/dumpsters, and otherwise “slumming” like it’s some kind of “fun-hip-cool lifestyle choice” (as opposed to a fact of life for poor working-class people and considering how class intersects with race as well, a fact of life for many immigrant and non-white families). Now don’t you think all the poor & working class folk & immigrant families who used to live in the neighborhood, before it became gentrified and made unaffordable by the hipsters, and who had no choice but to use food stamps, shop at thrift stores, and whom also had to work their butts off to pay the rent, would be just a tad upset watching these hipsters “slumming it up” with their part-time coffee shop jobs and trust funds, as if they were mocking them?

So, I’m sorry I don’t have much sympathy for those “poor” hipsters being all hated on…since I think it’s quite deserved and understandable. Yeah, I’m sure many hipsters are nice people and all, they could ALL be nice wonderful people for all I care, but that’s not really my point. My point is that while people are fussing over “1st generation vs. 2nd generation hipsters” & “hipster bashing” and so on, whole swaths of neighborhoods are being turned upside down as thousands of families (mostly poor, working class and non-white) are being displaced by rising rents and the closing of local businesses to the proliferation of chains catering to the well-to-do…yes of course it’s not all the fault of the hipster, but most often the hipster is the face of this change, as one person here stated, the harbinger of gentrification.

Yep, that is the real McCoy.

@Nobody in Particular

Right, it’s the “females” (ugh) who have all the power socially. That must be why so many teenage girls are insecure about their bodies and so many are victims of rape.

I’m sorry if I implied that it was the males who had all the power - that’s not what I was trying to say. What I was trying to say was within the social constructs of high school (ie: within its walls), teenage girls have a lot more power than they think (at least they did with guys in my social strata). Teenage boys are also supremely insecure, perhaps not about their bodies (though certainly that is an aspect), but about their identities and their masculinity. Getting dissed by a male was par for the course, but getting dissed by a female was social death.

Is it harder being a teenage girl than a teenage boy? Probably. No argument about the body image. Again I was talking within the four walls of school, so rape didn’t really enter the social equation, though I’m not trying to diminish it’s impact.

Honestly at least at my school, though probably I’m viewing this through the lens of male bias, I didn’t see any social “power” disadvantage for girls versus boys. Average to popular females seemed to be on equal footing with males in the same strata. That isn’t to say it wasn’t hard and didn’t suck for both groups, but from what I saw inside the school, females had just as much social capital as males (and within my group, probably more, even if they didn’t know it).

And if the girls are fat, “ugly,” or otherwise “uncool,” they’re targets of mockery or just invisible.

True, I didn’t specifically add that caveat though I thought I implied it. “uncool” for whatever reason females had very little social capital, but I would argue the same was true for “uncool” males. Who has it worse in high school, I don’t know. Having been on the wrong side of that coin myself for most of my high school years, I can say it sucks regardless.

Can’t believe we’re seeing this Nice Guy™ horseshit on a feminist blog, but then again, we get to see plenty of fat hatred and classism here, too….

Well while I’d like to be a “nice guy”, I try to be a “nice guy”, and I once thought I was a “nice guy” (trademark or no), the older I get, the more I see I’m flawed and not really a nice guy. In fact being my fathers son, and a male in general, it’s probably unlikely that I will be a nice guy no matter how hard I try. That is not intended to be a “poor me”, but an admission that I have discovered over the years that I am broken, highly imperfect, and wired whether by nature or nurture to be far more of an ass-hole than I ever wanted to be.

That is not intended to be an excuse either, I hope that I am a work in progress and can become a better human being, whether that’s inside or outside of feminist constructs (and undoubtedly I am mansplaining right now, to which I apologize, but honestly know no other way of conversation).

As far as posting this “horseshit” (your word, not mine) on a feminist blog, well Pandagon is a (excellent) highly linked (both inside and outside of feminist circles) public Internet site that comments on non-feminist issues as well and has an open comment section.

Clearly based on content, it wants to be controversial and elicit reaction. That reaction isn’t necessarily going to be positive or the sort one wants to hear (though honestly, I wasn’t trying to be controversial - however it isn’t the first time I’ve been accidentally clueless here).

As my therapist once told me (paraphrasing), “Learning to express your feelings is important, but if so, you have to be willing to expect the return.”  I may have it wrong in terms of my opinion here, in which case I do apologize (sincerely), but I think it’s reasonable to give my opinion (albeit, expecting the return).

Regardless, I will take your angst as a cue to rethink my positions here.

PS: Maybe this Dilbert cartoon captures my issues:

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-09-24/

scathew:

1.  Stop calling women “females.”  We’re not naked mole rats.  We’re women; when not adult, young women or girls.

2.  Talking about within the school walls doesn’t actually remove rape from the discussion.  Trust me.

3.  Girls are socialized to not put down boys because boys have these fragile egos and shit.  So they mostly don’t do it.  Are you now saying that girls (the subset of them who are attractive enough to be considered worth paying attention to) should use this “power” more?  Women who speak up to men sometimes find themselves physically assaulted.  I don’t think this is a good strategy for girls, dealing with boys, who usually don’t have quite the degree of restraint adults are supposed to have and literally do not understand consequences the way adults do.

4.  “Nice Guy” is a phrase you should Google before defending being one or claiming you don’t qualify.  It may be enlightening.

Unfortunately I am of the opinion that there is nothing I could say here, other than to agree without condition, that would be satisfactory. Clearly your response infers a pre-determined bias that extrapolates greatly (and incorrectly) on both the text of what I have said and who I am. Thus, even though you have your points and I would be interested in discussing them, I will skip and move on.

How quickly

I hope that I am a work in progress and can become a better human being, whether that’s inside or outside of feminist constructs (and undoubtedly I am mansplaining right now, to which I apologize, but honestly know no other way of conversation)....I will take your angst as a cue to rethink my positions here.
Comment #232: scathew on 09/24 at 08:50 AM</blockqutoe>
turns to
<blockquote>Unfortunately I am of the opinion that there is nothing I could say here, other than to agree without condition, that would be satisfactory. Clearly your response infers a pre-determined bias that extrapolates greatly (and incorrectly) on both the text of what I have said and who I am. Thus, even though you have your points and I would be interested in discussing them, I will skip and move on.
Comment #235: scathew on 09/24 at 11:48 AM

Interesting.  I didn’t make any comments at all about who you are.  Just about what you said.

Yep, that is the real McCoy.

Funny you’re now saying that while earlier stating:

Not to say all hipsters are reallyreally nice, but demanding that landlords don’t cater to people who can afford higher rents

which is really an argument justifying the wholesale dislocation of longtime working-class residents like my high school classmate and some band playing friends in favor of the highly socio-economically privileged such as the NYU students and hipsters now living in what was once his family’s lower east side apartment. 

Moreover, it seems you weren’t really aware or if so…weren’t really troubled that what the landlords did in cases like the high school friend is not only morally reprehensible…but also possibly illegal because he and his family were rent-controlled tenants at the time?? Unfortunately, neither the family nor I were socio-economically privileged enough to have the information and resources to get the legal aid necessary to fight back against the landlord’s efforts to evict the rent-controlled tenants….especially given the Giuliani administration’s policies which at best turned a blind eye to all that. 

To add insult to injury, that landlord continued to harassed us as we were in the process of moving out after the eviction order and even forcefully shoved me which prompted another one of the classmates’ friends to call in the cops to get him to stop.  So yes, I feel my band friends and I are justified in our resentments against the landlord and the “hipsters” as they use the term….

At the very least…you seem to be inconsistent…..agreeing with the problematic aspects of gentrification in one comment yet openly endorsing it with all of its ill effects in another….

I just think that lack of technical skill was….lack of technical skill and I’ll never ever get the fetishizing of it by punks.

The argument they made for this was that deemphasizing technical skill provides more access to those who weren’t professionally trained musicians to use music/musical instruments as a means of self-expression.  A way of “leveling the field” to allow anyone who wanted to express themselves musically/instrumentally can….even if they can only play a few chords…or just make noise. 

Of course, punk in a lot of ways to me = hypocrisy because, just to use The Clash as an example, they start out decrying needless virtuosity but lo and behold, 4 years later they’re releasing triple albums full of complex rhythms and lots of guitar solos.

Interesting you say that about their triple album Sandinista! considering how one friend who produced/plays in support of R & B/hip-hop/rap artists felt the lyrics of some songs on the album were great….but the musical composition/chord progressions were disappointingly amateurish. 

He’d certainly get a kick out of hearing someone say it has “complex rhythms”.

I don’t know the triple album myself, but chord progressions aren’t rhythms. 

Wikipedia says “With Sandinista! the band reached beyond punk and reggae into dub, rhythm and blues, calypso, gospel and other genres” which doesn’t say they did it WELL, just that they did it.  Unless you think reaching into those genres didn’t include different rhythms.

It’s interesting how you come up with this criticism on behalf of a friend, not owning it yourself.

It’s interesting how you come up with this criticism on behalf of a friend, not owning it yourself.

Because I disagree with my friend’s criticism, especially since he used what he considered “amateurish musical composition” to criticize the group and punk rock groups like them for being strong expressive lyricists/performers…..but musical amateurs at best. 

Just brought it up because Henry Holland’s last comment made reference to “complex rhythms” which reminded me of my friend’s criticisms of that album’s songs “amateurish musical composition”.  In that light, hearing HH’s comment about Sandinista! would certainly prompt a good laugh from him. 

Just an area of musical taste where my friend and I agree to completely disagree.  And I do have the Sandinista! album in a dual CD set.

@238 exholt,

The “real McCoy” comment is because the commenter was addressing why it didn’t matter what the individual “hipsters” do or say, the hate is directed at them because they are a harbinger of change.  And specially if change means that you don’t get to live there anymore, because you can’t pay for it, it can suck.  Even when understanding that everyone has a right to sell their goods to those who can pay the asking prices. 

I agree with the problematic aspects of gentrification, but I don’t agree with demonizing the people who can pay for the newly-hip neighborhood or the landlord who stands to benefit from it.  I don’t think I’m being inconsistent (but then again, nobody ever perceives inconsistency in themselves). 

The NYU student wants to live close to campus.  The landlord wants to make more money off their property.  I think your friends direct their hate at the hipsters and landlords because people always want to find someone to blame for their misfortunes. 

I mean, think about it this way:  Which (if any) of the following do you think is morally reprehensible:  Landlords striving to make more money off of their property, or people willing to pay high rents for a desirable and finite good like living quarters close to campus?

If, like me, you find neither of these morally reprehensible, then you will still think gentrification is still awful, but it has no clear perpetrators.

Remember the “In defense of music geeks” thread? Amanda made the point that music geeks know what they’re talking about, and everyone else made the point that sometimes geeks are fucking assholes about it.

IME hipsters are comprised of; posers, who know fuck all, but like the image, and kids who are genuinely smart about their topic, but get lumped in with the posers. In this way all hipsters are geeks: They know their own topic very well, but know fuck all about the wider world. SO they’re easy to hate. But it’s often very difficult to know who is the poser and who is the geek, without taking the time to talk about it at length.

I agree with the problematic aspects of gentrification, but I don’t agree with demonizing the people who can pay for the newly-hip neighborhood or the landlord who stands to benefit from it.  I don’t think I’m being inconsistent (but then again, nobody ever perceives inconsistency in themselves).

The landlords in seeking to maximize profit beyond ethical and even legal bounds are one big cause of this problem…..and thus…deserve the demonization.  Keep in mind that because of public policy concerns to provide minimal safeguards for the community/society at large, there are legal and ethical limits placed on businesses’ and landlords’ efforts to maximize their profits so they don’t do it at the expense of everyone else…whether it is the local community…or society at large. 

It was one reason why policies like rent control were imposed on landlords in NYC for so many decades…to allow working and lower-middle class residents to remain in their neighborhoods so communities were preserved.  Do you really want NYC to become exclusive playground of the leisurely upper-classes at the expense of everyone else?

As for NYU students….nearly all locals IME tended to commute from home for financial reasons so the dorms/off-campus apartments were dominated by non-local students.  And for the latter group, leaving the dorms for an off-campus was always a discretionary choice….especially considering the Village area dorms tended to be the same or lower cost than off-campus apartment rents in that part of Manhattan. 

This was furthered by the fact that in the mid-late ‘90s, NYU didn’t have a mandatory 1-2 year dorm residential requirement as was common among most private universities/colleges.  Consequently, undergrads could spend their entire careers living in off-campus apartments if they so chose.  Definitely a factor in why so many high school classmates, friends, and acquaintances who attended/graduated NYU* ranted about how there was no sense of a university community there….

In short, why can’t they live in the university dorms….especially considering how they’ve been building them up all around the village and nearby areas?

* Including non-locals.

Agg…I meant mandatory 1-2 year dorm residency requirement for non-local students….

Important as most private colleges/universities did exempt local students who wanted to commute from home to save money on housing and board costs.

raspberryjamba, hope you are still reading this thread…I am a loser, you posted a comment on my website and I accidentally deleted it and marked it as spam.  I would be super grateful if you’d try posting it again so I can unblock you and put the comment back up.

:(